What's up bike people and drupal people,
Here's a review of the ecommerce setup we have on Rockthebike.com:
Drupal 6
Ubercart
One of the coolest features of our Ubercart setup is the custom catalog section.
On www.rockthebike.com/products you'll see it.
It uses two nodequeues for the for the featured products, and permanent catalog beneath it.
Taking a look at one of the catalog pages, http://www.rockthebike.com/down-low-glow . This page is not a "product" node, as provided by Ubercart. It's a "catalog page" node. You can see that this page has related nodes in blocks on the right hand side, including testimonials, FAQs, and press reviews. The taxonomy system is what enabled this. Clicking the "buy now" button in the upper right doesn't add anything to your cart. Rather, it jogs you down the page to the list of products that are associated with this catalog page. These are product nodes provided by Ubercart.
So, in our installation, "catalog pages" are general descriptions of the concept, and "products" are the specific "what's in the box?" information. There's a one-to-many relationship between "catalog page" nodes and "product" nodes.