Product in multiple categories: Canonical vs strip URL?

[NVentouris]

Hi all,

I work on a e-commerce website which none had ever worked on SEO ever before.
They usually have 1 product in 4 subcategories. How do I treat this ?
Canonical ? and if I do which one of the 4 subcategories should I point the canonical ? eg. /tablets/memory-cards & photography/memory-cards & mobile-phones/memory-cards ...
strip url I mean /product-url
I have to mention here that the Website has about 14.000 products

Thanks,

[netmeg]

I use canonical and I don't use categories in the URL (except for subcats) So if the direct URL to the product is https://example.com/blue-widgets then that's the URL in *all* the categories. I don't know what platform (if any) that you are using; I spend most of my time in Magento and there are some reasonably good SEO extensions that handle that sort of thing.

[dipper]

easy - don't use category in the URL at all. Magento handles this setup by default.

[NVentouris]

My problem is not the URL just because we use SAP in order to pick the main catecory so thre is only one URL for each product. My question is:
If the structure of my site is:

Tablets>> Memory Cards
DSLR Photo>> Memory Cards
mobile Phones>> Memory Cards

These 3 Categories also are landing pages which they contain exactly the same products, So which one of the should Google rank for "Memory Cards" ?
Should I choose manually One of them and set canonical for the others ?

[dipper]

why have top level categories (in the URL) at all? - for the navigation yes it is important to file them and have them structured like that, but for URL (and in turn, canonical) no need. You could keep it a flat URL structure which also means a much shorter and easy to read URL.

Menu:
Tablets>> Memory Cards
DSLR Photo>> Memory Cards
mobile Phones>> Memory Cards

URL:
memory-cards.html

Again - Magento capable of this out of the box.

[netmeg]

Tablets>> Memory Cards
DSLR Photo>> Memory Cards
mobile Phones>> Memory Cards

I think that's a problem. Products in multiple categories you can get away with. Duplicated categories - not so much in my experience.

[NVentouris]

The Website platform is from 1999 and the platform has many restrictions. I will consider all your suggestions for the time we are gone to change our platform. Thank you all for your Replies.

[dipper]

move to a new platform - anything from 1999 should be long past it's use-by date!