u/rouge818

I am an experienced dev but new to RAG. I need to create an ecommerce shopping assitant chatbot using LLM API calls for the conversational piece. Customers would reach out via chat, and the agent/chatbot would help check inventory, make product recommendations, and create shopping carts based on what customers ask for.

I was looking at Claude Skills as an option to call the API to check inventory and provide a few results to the client in the chat. The API call would pretty much be passing a keyword and returning a few product results.

Since products will be categorized and have proper descriptions, I’m wondering if there is any benefit of going RAG and embeddings instead of the approach I mentioned using skills. Anyone have any thoughts on wether this is a good approach? Or would it make sense to use RAG and embedding for something like this?