Product Descriptions for eCommerce Websites

I am currently working on an ecommerce site with about 50,000 product pages and the products need unique descriptions. How do you guys go about scaling something like this? It would be extremely costly to outsource and very time consuming to do myself without any shortcuts. The site already has a comment / review section on each product page, which is generating unique content, but there isn't optimized content on the pages (which we need for long-tail traffic).

I'm interested in any suggestions. Thanks guys

This is what I would recommend: Hire a high end copywriter for the page content (PM me if interested) and cut corners with the product descriptions. After you've compiled the product descriptions, pay your original copy writer to proofread and edit the work. This should save you some cash. I would argue that, for eCommerce Websites, copy is more important than design. Honestly, if you have the cash and you're very serious about selling your products, the money you invest in copy will be well worth it in the long run. Good luck!

Hey that's so clever jesse.

So funny Guy

Here is what I did for one of my first ecommerce websites (furniture niche - awful, I know), 5k products.. not 50k, but still.
I also had comment/review plugins for each product, and spammed my social media accounts with links to the products so people can go and comment/review even if they didn't buy.

I couldn't afford to outsource 500 word product descriptions, nor I was ready to sit down and write them. Instead, I just re-wrote the original descriptions from the manufacturers and added a sentence here and there.

I created awesome category pages (ex. Living Room Furniture), and added 1000 words to them, plenty of internal links to products, and these websites started ranking well.
Also, I slowly started writing articles on my blog about some of the products, and linking to them. Some people would say this is not a good practice because you have 2 pages competing for the same keyword. However, my actual product page was not really competing with anyone because of the relatively poor content and, of course, images similar to 10,000 other furniture stores.

If you can afford 50k x 500 words unique content for each product, you will be king my friend, and I will gladly be your jester

I'd suggest perhaps focus on your highest paying/most searched for items and working your way down. I would attempt to rank product guides and blog articles first.