Medium
Amazon

Design an Online Shopping System Object-Oriented Design Interview

Design an online shopping domain model covering the product catalog, SKU inventory, shopping cart, order lines with snapshotted prices, a checkout flow, a payment boundary, and shipment state transitions.

1. Problem Statement

Design an online shopping system: customers browse a catalog, add items to a cart, and check out to create an order that is paid for and shipped. Focus on the domain model — products, SKUs and inventory, cart, order with line-item prices, checkout, payment, and shipment. Start by clarifying scope and the core objects.

2. Live Coding Format

Work in the provided coding workspace while explaining your decisions to the live interviewer. Validation may use inline tests, examples, comments, or a verbal walkthrough.

3. Key Focus Areas

  • 1
    Product/SKU/inventory modeling
  • 2
    Cart and cart-item quantity invariants
  • 3
    Order lines with snapshotted prices and order state transitions
  • 4
    Idempotent checkout and inventory reserve/commit/release
  • 5
    Payment gateway boundary and shipment lifecycle

4. What Strong Candidates Should Demonstrate

  • Separate Product, SKU, Cart, Order, and Shipment responsibilities cleanly.
  • Snapshot order-line prices so placed orders are immune to later catalog changes.
  • Model inventory reserve/commit/release to prevent overselling.
  • Make checkout idempotent at the application boundary and treat payment as an interface.

Want interactive feedback?

Practice this problem in the live coding workspace while the interviewer probes your clarification, implementation, trade-offs, and validation.

Continue to Dashboard

Core Concepts

Object-Oriented DesignDomain ModelingState MachineIdempotency

Continue preparing

Build a complete software engineer mock interview plan

Prepare by company

Related Object-Oriented Design

Design a Hotel Management System

Design a hotel domain model covering room types and rooms, guests, a half-open date-range value object, the reservation lifecycle, room assignment, check-in/out, and a charges folio, while preventing overlapping bookings on the same room.

Related Object-Oriented Design

Design a Restaurant Management System

Design a restaurant domain model covering tables and capacity, reservations for time slots, seated parties, a menu, orders with priced line items, kitchen status, and bills with payments, keeping booking and order/kitchen state transitions correct.

Related Object-Oriented Design

Design an Airline Management System

Design an airline domain model covering airports, aircraft seat layouts, scheduled flights versus dated flight instances, passengers, reservations and tickets, seat assignment, and flight status transitions.

Related Object-Oriented Design

Design an Online Stock Brokerage System

Design a brokerage domain model covering accounts and portfolios, instruments, a cash ledger, market and limit orders, immutable fills, derived positions, order state transitions, and an external exchange gateway boundary — without building a matching engine.