Design a REST API for E-commerce

Design a RESTful API for an e-commerce platform that handles products, orders, customers, and payments.

Functional Requirements

• Product catalog with categories, search, and filtering
• Shopping cart management
• Order placement and tracking
• Customer authentication and profiles
• Payment processing integration
• Inventory management

Non-Functional Requirements

• Handle 10,000+ requests per second
• Sub-100ms response times for reads
• Strong consistency for orders and payments
• API versioning strategy
• Rate limiting and throttling

Questions to Consider

• How do you design resource hierarchies and relationships?
• What pagination strategy works best for large collections?
• How do you handle partial updates vs full replacements?