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Flipkart / Shopping — Notes#

Functional#

  • Same as Amazon: catalog, cart, order, payment, logistics, returns.
  • India-specific: UPI, Cash on Delivery, EMI, Plus subscription.

Non-functional#

  • 200M+ users; ~10× normal load during BBD sales.
  • p99 product page < 300 ms.
  • Strong consistency on payment & order.

Capacity (sale-day)#

  • Peak 100k orders/min for short windows.
  • Catalog reads: many million/s.
  • 1B+ cache reads/min.

Schema#

  • Mostly same as Amazon; emphasize Indian payment instruments.
  • payment_method(id, type, provider, last4, upi_handle).

Trade-offs#

  • COD = high RTO cost; algorithms predict & limit risk.
  • Sale-day reservations: hold stock with TTL so abandoned carts don't tie up inventory.
  • Heavy promo engine complicates pricing — keep deterministic rule evaluation order.

Refs#

  • Flipkart engineering blog (BBD scale, Ekart logistics, payment), Myntra / Meesho engineering posts, ByteByteGo "Design e-commerce".