Pricing & Promotions interview questions

Price hierarchies, promotion eligibility and stacking, coupons, and auditing a final price.

3 questions in E-commerce & Retail.

E-commerce and RetailA 19-minute read on how the topic fits together, before the questions.E-commerce and retail fundamentals58 short answers on one page, for revising rather than studying.

hard3

hardScenarioDesign

An upstream feed resets ten thousand of your prices to a penny and orders start arriving. What should have stopped it, and what do you do with the orders that got through?

Nothing in the pricing engine was broken, so the control has to sit on the change itself: bounds relative to the previous price and the cost, a rate limit on bulk movement, and a kill switch. Then pause dispatch before anyone debates whether to honour the orders.

6 minmid, senior, staff, lead

hardDesignScenario

A customer disputes their total and asks why. Can your system answer?

Only if it recorded which rules fired, in what order, against which lines, at the moment of the order. Recomputing today gives a different answer because prices and campaigns have moved, so the price becomes unexplainable exactly when someone needs it explained.

4 minmid, senior, staff

hardScenarioDesign

Your promotions engine lets two discounts stack when it should not. How do you fix it and stop it recurring?

Model eligibility, exclusivity, and priority as explicit promotion data rather than accumulated conditionals, pin a deterministic evaluation order because the same two discounts applied in a different sequence produce a different total, and persist a price trace finance can read months later.

6 minmid, senior, staff