Ratings & Reviews API for E-Commerce Website

Overview:

Responsible for over 24 million lines of csv data. Export from an old database that needed to be restructured for efficient use by an e-commerce clothing retail company. This data comprised of ratings and reviews for several million products.

Challenge:

Build a quick, efficient, and reliable backend to serve and store all ratings and review data related to any product ID in our database.

Process:

During the evaluation stages for this project I explored several database options which included a SQL based database in PostgreSQL and a noSQL based database in MongoDB. I weighed the benefits and challenges of each database in decided where to store the old csv data. This included schema designs, aggregation ideas, indexing, memory considerations of server, and overall flow of data to and from the front end.

Solution:

Following the evaluation I opted to utilize MongoDB as the datastore for this project. I found that the loose rules and document styling of Mongo lend itself to the way that the front end was expecting data when it would be requested. This led to quicker responses with near perfect success rates under heavy load (see testing statistics below).

Tech Stack

Server: Node, Express, and Axios

Database: MongoDB

Deployment: 3x AWS EC2 - 20.04 Ubuntu - 8gb SDD 1gb RAM

Unit Testing: Mocha, Chai w/ Chai-HTTP

Local Stress Testing: New Relic w/ Artillery

Cloud Stress Testing: Loader.io

Optimizations

Implemented MongoDB aggregation to streamline multiple collections and queries into a single collection and query.

Utilized AWS Application load balancer to support upwards of 1400 rps of traffic with less than 1% error rate.

API Reference

Overview

This document should be utilized when interacting with the E-Commerce API and more specifically with the Ratings and Reviews routes. Use the documentation below you to retrieve data regarding the ratings, reviews, and associated metadata for any product within the E-Commerce API database as well as add and update any reviews and ratings.

List Reviews

Returns all reviews for a given product ID

  GET /reviews/

Query Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description
product_id	uint	Required. Specifies the product for which to retrieve reviews for
page	uint	Optional. Specifies the page of results to return. Default 1
count	uint	Optional. Specifies the number of results per page to return. Default 5
sort	string	Optional. Changes the sort order of reviews. Options - newest, helpful, relevant

Response:

Status: 200 OK

List Review Metadata

Returns metadata of reviews for a given product ID

  GET /reviews/meta/

Query Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description
product_id	uint	Required. Specifies the product for which to retrieve reviews for

Response:

Status: 200 OK

Add New Review

Adds a new review for the given product ID

  POST /reviews/

Body Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description
product_id	uint	Required. Specifies the product to add the review for
rating	uint	Optional. Unsigned integer (1-5) - indicating the review rating score
summary	string	Optional. Summary text of the review
body	string	Optional. Full text for the review being left
recommend	bool	Optional. Boolean value indicating if the reviewer recommends the product
name	string	Optional. Username for the individual leaving the review
email	string	Optional. Email address for the individual leaving the review
photos	string[]	Optional. Array of text urls that link to the images to be shown for each review
characteristics	object	Optional. Object of with keys representing a characteristic_id and values representing the score for that characteristics. Ie. { “14” : 3, “15” : 5 }

Response:

Status: 201 CREATED

Update Helpfulness of a Review

Updates the helpfulness score of the given review ID by the count of 1

  PUT /reviews/:review_id/helpful/

Query Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description
review_id	uint	Required. Specifies the review for which you want to increase the helpfulness score

Response:

Status: 204 NO CONTENT

Update Reported value of a Review

Updates the helpfulness score of the given review ID by the count of 1

  PUT /reviews/:review_id/report/

Query Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description
review_id	uint	Required. Specifies the review for which you want to report. This will result in this review no longer returning on any GET calls

Response:

Status: 204 NO CONTENT

Testing Results

Authors

• @cjohansen11