Design an e-commerce category page

Q: Design an e-commerce category page

This is a System Design interview question from Instacart for Software Engineer roles. View the full question and solution on PracHub.

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Question

System Design: Category Page with Facets, Sorting, Pagination, SEO, Caching, Personalization, and Real-Time Updates

Design the backend and serving architecture for an e-commerce category page (e.g., /electronics/phones) that supports:

Functional Requirements

Faceted filtering: brand, price, rating (extensible to others like attributes, availability)
Sorting: relevance, price (asc/desc), popularity
Pagination and infinite scroll (cursor-based preferred)
SEO-friendly rendering (SSR/SSG, crawlability, canonical URLs)
Optional personalization of ranking
Near-real-time inventory and price updates

Non-Functional Constraints

Scale: 10^6+ SKUs, 10^4 QPS on category endpoints
High-traffic categories should benefit from aggressive caching (CDN/edge/app)
Specify consistency vs freshness strategy
Specify APIs, data models, indexing/search strategy, ranking signals
Specify cache hierarchy and keys, read/write patterns
Approaches for A/B testing, metrics, and monitoring
Discuss key trade-offs and likely bottlenecks

Design an e-commerce category page

Functional Requirements

Non-Functional Constraints

Solution (Locked)

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