PHP Interview question

Question

I recently interviewed at a well known PHP company.

The one question they have asked to check my approach or CMS knowledge, is...

What will be your approach or what component or CMS you will use if you have to develop a e-comm. site that give functionality to its user to compare product price with other sites/store?

I was clueless .. Can you guys please help me out to find its answer?

Answer 1

I suspect it was asked in a very broad way in order to see how you think. When I hear that question, I would ask things like "What sites or stores? How is the data going to be acquired and stored? An E-Commerce site that re-directs traffic and transactions to other sites??? How many products? What Graphics resources do we have at our disposal? Is there anything currently in place? Do we have internal experience with a specific CMS or component that people are happy with? What transaction processor are we going to use? What's the requested time-frame for development?."

This kind of question doesn't have a true right answer, but you can dazzle or disappoint with how you respond.

Answer 2

I would answer by asking if those other sites have got an API that lets you fetch the price of a product or if they want the prices to be retrieved via parsing those sites' HTML, and then I would develop the code myself which retrieves the prices + compares those prices and shows the results.

If they want someone already familiar with a 3rd party component which does this, IMO they're looking for a plumber rather than a programmer. They'll want you just for installing other stuff which in many cases is spaghetti code and a pain to work with. A good place would allow you to write your own code, that's after all the job of a programmer.