Top 3 Marketplace Interview Questions

Browse 3 real-world technical and behavioral interview questions about Marketplace. Review scenarios, edge cases, and architectural best practices.

A customer walks into one of your stores to return an item they bought from a third-party seller on your site. Who ends up holding the stock, and whose money pays the refund?

The store can only accept it if the platform decides at the counter, funds the refund itself and recovers it from the seller's payout. That leaves you holding another company's goods on your floor and an unsecured balance if the seller has nothing left to offset against.

hardscenario

Design the checkout flow for a marketplace with multiple sellers per order.

Persist the order in a pending state before you touch the payment gateway, quote tax and shipping per seller shipment, authorise once behind an idempotency key, and commit the remaining steps through a transactional outbox and a saga whose compensations void the authorisation and release reserved stock.

harddesign

One basket contains items from three sellers and one line the customer wants to collect in store. What does that do to your design?

The basket splits into one customer order and several fulfilment orders per seller, the single payment is apportioned into a seller ledger that must survive a refund arriving after the payout, and the collect line is a promise made against a store count far less accurate than a warehouse's.

harddesign