Discussing Frontend System design with e-commerce

Photo by Mark König on Unsplash

This can be a typical interview question you can encounter when interviewing for frontend engineer positions.

Essentially here is the question we are trying to discuss:

• Design an e-commerce website that allows users to browse products and purchase them.

To approach this, let’s understand the functional and non-functional requirements.

Well…what are the functional requirements?

• able to browse products
• adding products to cart
• being able to checkout

How about the pages we need to view?

• product list page
• product details page
• Cart page
• checkout page

Now let’s discuss about the non-functional requirements:

• loading should take less than 2 minutes per page. Interaction with the application should happen relatively quickly.

Since we are focused on the frontend portion side of things, we won’t worry too much about design the services behind the scene. Rather, let’s focus on the components that are available:

• server: this server will be focused on modifying product data, adding products to…