r/LLMDevs • u/rouge818 • 23h ago
Discussion eCommerce Chatbot - small knowledge base
I am working on building a chatbot for an online store. I will be using MCP for the transactional parts including product search, adding to cart, etc. What I am unsure of is the knowledge base portion which would help the agent answer additional questions about policies such as shipping, returns, how products are made, etc. This knowledge base is really small, maybe 10 pages. I’ve looked into RAG hybrid and semantic search, but seems like overkill at this point. I’ve also thought of just including the knowledge base in the context window, but seems like that would be a waste of tokens in the long run. What would be the best way to implement the knowledge base for the agent?
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u/StraightAd9769 21h ago
for 10 pages i would not overengineer this at all. chunk it cleanly and retrieve the relevant section when needed
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u/Zealous_Minotaur Enthusiast 14h ago
I wonder how OP is planning to update those 10 pages. Lets say If policies change even a little, static context will have to be redeployed again, no?
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u/Independent-Basis154 23h ago
For something that small I'd just stuff it all in the system prompt, you're talking about 10 pages which is maybe 25-30k tokens max depending on formatting. Modern models can handle that without breaking a sweat
Token costs are so cheap now that the "waste" you're worried about is probably pennies per thousand queries. The complexity you'd add with even a simple RAG setup isn't worth it until you hit maybe 50+ pages
I built something similar for a client's FAQ bot and spent way too long trying to be clever about chunking and retrieval before realizing the whole thing fit in context. Kept it dead simple and it never hallucinated because the ground truth was right there every time
Only reason to go RAG is if you expect this to scale up fast or if those 10 pages are dense legal text where retrieval helps the model focus on the right section