📹 Live: Amazon Product Search, Rapid-Fire Feature Design

Today in Interview Camp's live session, we discussed Designing Features for Amazon.com

This is a very common pattern in interviews. The interviewer can pick any feature to design - whether it be Recommendations, Bestsellers, Product Catalog or Shopping Cart. These can either be standalone questions, or part of a larger System design question.

For example, Design the Amazon Search Bar can be asked in other contexts, like Design Search for a Library, Design Search for a local store.

We started of by listing such features. Here is the list we came up with:

1. Design a Shopping Cart

   • Top Product Ranking - similar to App Store top apps
     top 100 apps
   • Time frames - last 24 hours, last hour, last month

2. Type-ahead search for a product

3. Fulfillment center

4. Product Recommendations

5. Product Catalog - two flavors:

   • You own the inventory
   • Sellers on the platform - marketplace

6. Checkout

   • Payment Processing - rare to be asked specifics
   • Handling entire checkout - payment, inventory reduction, multiple people
   • trying to checkout

7. Flash Auctions - DealDash, Beezid

8. Delivery Tracking

9. Searching a Product

10. Design Amazon Locker Service

11. Returns Processing

12. Save For Later or Shopping List

13. Product Reviews

We then conducted a mock interview with one of our students. We asked them to Design the Product Search bar for Amazon. After the Mock, we had discussions around the topic. Here are notes from the mock interview:

We then discussed two other features: Designing Type-Ahead Search and Designing the Shopping Cart.

For those, we discussed things like Tries vs Key-Value stores for Typeahead search, shopping cart synchronization - if two people simultaneously update the cart, etc.

We hope you found this useful! To access these sessions live, please sign up at Interview Camp