System Design of an E-commerce Website

Overview

• Designing an e-commerce system similar to Amazon.
• Focus on use cases, system architecture, APIs, database model, and concurrency.

Use Cases

• User Profile Management: Create and update user profiles.
• Product Listing: Display available products.
• Shopping Cart: Add products to the cart.
• Purchase: Buy products from the cart.
• Order Tracking: Track placed orders.

System Design

• API Layer: Routes requests to appropriate services.
• User Manager: Handles user details and profile updates.
• Listing Manager: Manages product listings and availability.
• Cart Manager: Adds products to the cart and manages checkout process.
• Order Manager: Creates orders from cart data and processes them.
• Payment Manager: Handles payments through external services.

APIs

1. UserManager API:
   • Create/Update user profiles.
2. ListingManager API:
   • Retrieve all products (can be optimized for user-specific needs).
   • Reduce product quantity when ordered.
3. CartManager API:
   • Add products to user cart.
   • Checkout process: Places order, reduces quantity, manages payment, returns order ID.
4. OrderManager API:
   • Create orders for a user.
   • Track all orders for a user.
   • Track specific order details.
5. PaymentManager API:
   • Make payment and return tracking ID.

Database Model

• User Entity:
  • Attributes: ID, Name, Email ID, Phone, etc.
• Product Entity:
  • Attributes: ID, Name, Price, Quantity.
• Order Entity:
  • Attributes: ID, User ID, List of Products, Order Date, Tracking Details.

Concurrency

• Concurrency Handling:
  • Use locks in Listing Manager to prevent conflicts when users order the same item.
  • Handle failed updates gracefully in checkout process.

Conclusion

• Broad problem suited for high-level design discussions.
• Important to start with use cases and simple diagrams.
• Could dive deeper into subsystems and discuss failure scenarios, scaling, etc.
• Scope for future discussions or videos on specific components.