Design a Database Schema for an E-Commerce Website

Requirements: Design the database schema for an e-commerce website with no fixed constraints given by the interviewer — the candidate is expected to surface and reason about bottlenecks themselves. Scenarios to account for:

• Ordering products
• Clients having multiple delivery addresses
• Multiple sellers, with the same product sellable by more than one seller
• Order tracking / order status
• Registering a new product
• Inventory tracking per seller
• Product search
• Shopping cart containing products from different sellers

Design: Core tables typically include Users, Addresses (1-to-many with Users), Sellers, Products, ProductListings (seller-product-price-inventory join), Orders, OrderItems, OrderStatusHistory, and Cart/CartItems. Key discussion points: normalizing product vs listing data so the same product can map to multiple sellers, indexing for search, and how order status transitions are tracked and audited.