The on-the-fly page capability of MiniVend makes it easy to build your catalog without hard-coding a single page. To build category pages, use the one-click search and the search result page. To display information about single items, use the flypage.html template. You can customize these pages in many ways, and you can even use different templates for different types of products -- define a product database field (with the PageSelectField directive) to hold the name of the base on-the-fly page for that item. You might define it to be the same as the category of product, for example.
If you have a large catalog, you will almost certainly want to use the on-the-fly page for most products. But if you want to mix in a few extra-special pages, perhaps for your best sellers, you can do so. Just build the pages and place them in files corresponding to the part number (in the MiniVend pages directory, of course -- not your HTML directory). They will take precedence over the on-the-fly page.
If you have only a small number of products, hard coded pages are just fine, though you would be surprised how much of a maintenance headache they are compared to database definitions. Build them just about like normal HTML pages, except for the MiniVend tags to order the item. Place them wherever they can be reached -- if you are using searches, you will want to name the file by the part number, or at least make a link to it.
Some other things you might put in: