Design a backend system for an e-commerce website that shows a list of merchandise. The system should focus on the browsing aspect, not on how to make purchases.
Use popularity to select what to display as the top items. Build an offline batching pipeline to process what’s popular.
This question focuses on the backend design of an e-commerce browsing experience rather than the purchase flow. The key idea is to determine which merchandise should be surfaced as top items based on popularity, using an offline batching pipeline to aggregate user behavior signals such as views and clicks. A strong answer should discuss data collection, batch processing, ranking generation, caching, refresh strategy, and scalability tradeoffs.
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