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1.2.1 e-Commerce Web site types
Understand your Web site's characteristics. In general, Business to Consumer (B2C) sites derive greater performance benefits from the caching of entire HTML pages and/or HTML page fragments than do Business to Business (B2B) sites because the number of clients requesting services from a B2C site is generally much larger than that of a B2B. There are more successful cache hits per client on a well structured B2C site than on a B2B site.
B2C sites typically have many requests that target the same data and the benefits for caching that data are much higher when compared to the more personalized, often highly client-specific B2B page requests. Despite this, caching can still play an important role in a B2B site. For B2B sites, it is a case of adjusting the caching strategy to better suit the data request models and interactions occurring between the client and the site. The common caching strategy for a B2B site takes into account the fact that there are often many page fragments or parts of an HTML page that can be cached, rather than whole pages.
Having a good understanding of your type of Web site and its inherent dynamics is important when assessing the potential benefits of caching.