There's 2 ways to look at this:
From the visitors/buyers perspective
From SEO perspective
Visitors:
These days, I don't think that visitors care a lot about all the additional information on homepages that is often used by companies to present their selves the best way possible.
I feel that visitors would like to see what they came for straight away (the products that are being soled) and AFTER that the additional information such as payment methods, time of delivery, returns policy etc. Not the other way around.
When you have about 50 products or so, it's still user friendly.. 500 would be a bit of an overkill if presented in one single page.
From SEO persepective:
This is something I find VERY interesting.
How will Google rank a homepage that's been made as a productoverview? Would it be ranked lower or higher than a productoverview that has been placed at: www.example.com/productoverview/
?
Something we do know about Google is that pages that are used as a URL base for other pages rank higher because of the value of all the pages that is vloting threw to the base page, for example:
www.example.com/productoverview
would receive SEO value from the pages: www.example.com/productoverview/product1
and www.example.com/productoverview/product2
etc.
Now.. if you would make your productoverview your homepage, it would become the base of ALL pages: blogs, products, categories, customer service etc etc.
It would make it the top of the hierarchy and therefore potentially a good SEO ranked page.
But that's just a theory..
I am now building on a website where I will use 60 products as a homepage and landing page. So in a few months I'll be able to see the SEO effect on this.