Ruankao E-Commerce Designer (Intermediate) study plan
Ruankao E-Commerce Designer (Intermediate) · Give each week a clear focus.
8 weeks · About 7 hours per week
E-Commerce System Design and Architecture & E-Commerce Fundamentals and Business Models
Diagram the standard three-tier and microservices e-commerce reference architectures, labeling presentation, business-logic, and data tiers plus the integration points between them
Compare monolithic, SOA, and microservices deployment styles against at least five quality attributes (scalability, availability, deployability, transaction consistency, operational cost)
Explain the business-model canvas and classify B2B, B2C, C2C, O2O, and B2B2C models by participant roles, revenue mechanism, and fulfillment flow
Trace one complete order-to-cash flow (catalog → cart → payment → fulfillment → settlement) and mark where each architecture component participates
Your checkpoint
A 2-page architecture comparison sheet: one hand-drawn reference diagram plus a 5-attribute × 3-style comparison table and a one-paragraph justification of a chosen style for a mid-size retailer
E-Commerce System Design and Architecture & E-Commerce System Planning and Analysis
Decompose an e-commerce platform into bounded contexts (catalog, identity, cart, order, payment, inventory, logistics, promotion) and define each context's responsibility and owned data
Specify the synchronous and asynchronous interaction contracts between order, inventory, and payment services, including idempotency and compensation for failed payment
Apply requirements-elicitation techniques (stakeholder interviews, use-case modeling, event storming) to produce a prioritized requirement backlog for a sample storefront
Distinguish functional from non-functional requirements and write measurable NFRs for availability, peak concurrency, and page-load latency
Your checkpoint
A context map with 8 bounded contexts, their interfaces, and a 15-item prioritized requirement backlog where every NFR has a numeric target
Web and Mobile Application Development & Database Design and Data Management
Design the core relational schema (customer, product, SKU, inventory, order, order-line, payment, shipment) with primary keys, foreign keys, and appropriate indexes
Apply normalization to third normal form and then justify deliberate denormalization for catalog read paths and reporting
Compare server-side rendering, single-page application, and progressive web app approaches for a storefront, including SEO and first-paint trade-offs
Specify a REST or GraphQL API contract for product search and cart operations, covering pagination, error codes, and versioning
Explain responsive and mobile-first layout plus session/token handling for a mobile shopping flow
Your checkpoint
An ER diagram for the order and catalog schemas plus a written API contract for five endpoints, each with request/response fields, status codes, and one indexing rationale
Network, Security, and Payment Technologies & Database Design and Data Management
Map the OWASP Top 10 risks to concrete e-commerce attack surfaces (credential stuffing, cart tampering, payment callback forgery, injection through search) and select a control for each
Explain TLS, certificate chains, and HTTPS termination at the load balancer, and describe how session cookies should be flagged (Secure, HttpOnly, SameSite)
Compare payment models: gateway redirect, hosted payment page, and tokenized card-on-file, and describe the role of PCI DSS scope reduction
Design transaction boundaries and isolation levels for inventory deduction under concurrent checkout, and explain optimistic versus pessimistic locking
Describe data-at-rest protection for personal and payment data, including field-level encryption, masking, and retention rules
Your checkpoint
A threat-and-control matrix covering 10 e-commerce-specific risks, each with likelihood, impact, chosen control, and the layer where the control is enforced
E-Commerce Operations, Marketing, and Logistics & E-Commerce Fundamentals and Business Models
Model the fulfillment lifecycle from order confirmation through picking, packing, shipping, delivery, and return, and identify the system event at each state transition
Compare fulfillment models (self-operated warehouse, third-party logistics, dropshipping, store pickup) on cost, control, lead time, and return complexity
Design a promotion and coupon engine rule set that prevents stacking abuse and states how rules interact with pricing and inventory reservation
Explain funnel metrics (traffic, conversion, cart abandonment, average order value, repurchase rate) and how each is instrumented in the platform
Outline a customer-retention loop using segmentation, lifecycle messaging, and post-purchase review collection
Your checkpoint
A fulfillment state machine with at least 8 states and transitions, plus a promotion-rule specification for 3 campaigns with explicit stacking and exclusion rules
E-Commerce System Planning and Analysis & Network, Security, and Payment Technologies
Produce a capacity estimate for a peak sales event by deriving requests per second from concurrent users, page weight, and think time
Design a horizontally scalable deployment with load balancing, caching layers (CDN, page cache, object cache), and a read replica strategy, and state the failure mode of each layer
Specify monitoring and alerting for availability, error rate, latency percentiles, and payment success rate, and define an incident escalation path
Explain reconciliation between internal order records and payment-channel settlement files, including handling of mismatches and refunds
Describe settlement, chargeback, and refund flows and the data each requires from the payment gateway
Your checkpoint
A capacity and resilience plan: peak RPS calculation with assumptions, a layered caching diagram, and a table of 6 alerts with thresholds and owners
Project Management, Standards, and Professional Practice & E-Commerce System Planning and Analysis
Build a work breakdown structure for an e-commerce release and estimate effort with three-point estimation, then derive a critical path
Identify and rank 8 project risks with probability, impact, response strategy, and trigger condition
Map quality activities (code review, test pyramid, performance test, security scan, UAT) to release milestones and define exit criteria for each
Summarize the standards and professional-practice expectations relevant to e-commerce delivery: accessibility, privacy and personal-information protection, electronic signature and transaction record-keeping, and change control
Draft a change-request procedure that covers impact analysis, approval, and rollback
Your checkpoint
A one-page release plan containing the WBS, critical path, top-8 risk register, and milestone exit criteria, plus a change-request form template
English Reading and Technical Documentation & E-Commerce System Design and Architecture & Network, Security, and Payment Technologies
Read and summarize an English-language technical specification or architecture decision record in under 200 words, extracting requirements, constraints, and open questions
Write an English design note of 250–300 words explaining the chosen architecture to a non-technical stakeholder
Answer English reading-comprehension items on e-commerce topics by locating evidence in the passage rather than relying on memory
Run two timed mixed-domain practice sets and classify every error by domain and by cause (knowledge gap, misread, calculation, time pressure)
Re-derive the three highest-value weak points from the error log and state the corrective action for each
Your checkpoint
An error log from two timed practice sets with at least 20 classified errors, plus one 250–300-word English design note and a one-page summary of the top 3 weak areas with corrective actions
Milestones
Week 2: You can draw the platform context map from memory and explain, without notes, why order, inventory, and payment are separate services and how a failed payment is compensated
Week 4: You can produce the order/catalog ER diagram and the threat-and-control matrix from scratch, and correctly answer 8 of 10 self-written questions on isolation levels, idempotency, and PCI scope
Week 6: You can derive peak RPS from stated assumptions, name the failure mode of each caching layer, and explain settlement reconciliation and chargeback handling end to end
Week 8: Timed practice scores are at or above 70% overall with no single domain below 60%, and the error log shows fewer than 5 repeated error causes from week 7