E-commerce assistants: catalog questions on repeat, margins on the line
Shipping times, return windows, size guides, 'does this come in blue?' — commerce traffic is seasonal, spiky, and gloriously repetitive. Cache accordingly.
Commerce assistants live on a short menu of intents: availability, shipping, returns, sizing, compatibility, care instructions. Customers phrase them infinitely; the answers barely move between catalog updates. Paying frontier-model prices to re-explain your return window forty thousand times in November is margin erosion dressed up as innovation.
Crowkis's template matching is unusually effective here because product queries are structurally identical with different entities: 'does the AX-200 ship to Canada?' and 'does the BX-300 ship to Germany?' share a template with different slots. Structural plus semantic matching catches the repetition that pure embeddings blur, with the confidence gate keeping distinct products distinct.
Every paraphrase is a fresh bill — unless the cache understands meaning.
Freshness is the commerce-specific superpower: tie TTLs to catalog and policy versions, fire invalidation webhooks on price or stock changes, and the holiday-sale answer dies the moment the sale does. Smart eviction protects the expensive long-tail answers while the seasonal head churns safely.
The bottom line
Black Friday is the stress test caching was invented for — traffic multiplies, questions converge, and every cached hit is both saved spend and saved seconds at the moment your infrastructure and your customers are most impatient. Warm the cache before the surge; the dashboard will narrate the payoff live.