Ask HN: What's the best inexpensive way to gather product data?

I have a few ideas for providing a service based on product data. I've seen various data companies selling data (which is generally very expensive), APIs and scraping data. I just need basic data such as brand, product identifier and short description but the data should be relatively up to date.

What are some other alternatives or sources for getting this data? Ideally, a freely available data dump of consumer product data.