Is caching certain parts of a page possible? I have created a drupal 7 commerce site that displays some real time data to visitors as current number of purchases, upcoming products in the next day or so etc. Is there a way to cache parts of the site / page so that not everything is reconstructed on every request?
For example for each product everything can be cached except from the number of current purchases, so I would like to cache images, prices, theme etc, but not the number of current purchases. 
Is it possible?
If you use the Page manager together with Panels, then yes, this is trivial. Each "Pane", in a Panel can have it's own cache settings, and they can also be set on a per user basis, meaning you can cache things, even if they include data that is unique for the logged in user.

If you also add Cache actions on top of that, you can add some really aggressive caching that will be cleared only, and exactly, when the relevant data updates.