Design an e-commerce catalog

Q: Design an e-commerce catalog

This question evaluates system design skills including relational data modeling, hierarchical category representation, product variant and attribute modeling, API design, caching, and search/index consistency trade-offs for an e-commerce product catalog.

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Question

System Design: Product Catalog Service

You are designing a product catalog service for an e‑commerce site. Assume a read‑heavy workload, a relational primary store, and JSON over HTTP APIs.

Requirements:

Data model
- Hierarchical categories using a self‑referential Category table (parent → child). Show the self‑join for categories.
- Products can belong to multiple categories.
- Model product variants (e.g., size/color) and arbitrary attributes.
- Specify a relational schema: tables, key fields, and indexes.
APIs
- Create/update products and categories.
- Browse products by category with pagination and filtering.
- Search/filter by attributes.
- Fetch product detail.
- Provide example endpoints with example request/response payloads. Include pagination and filtering syntax.
Architecture/operations
- Discuss consistency choices (DB vs. cache vs. search index), caching, read/write patterns.
- How to scale to 10M products and ~1k QPS reads.

Assumptions (you may refine): JSON APIs, REST style; prices/inventory may be separate services; 10M products, typical product has a few variants; peak read 1k QPS, writes much lower.

Design an e-commerce catalog

System Design: Product Catalog Service

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Design an e-commerce catalog

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System Design: Product Catalog Service

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