Product design question

Create a product called ‘Shops’ for WhatsApp.

Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.

What this question tests

Tests product design for commerce-within-messaging, requiring the candidate to reason about small-business use cases.

Target small and local businesses using WhatsApp as their primary sales channel, especially in markets like India and Brazil, plus their customers.
Identify the pain point: businesses currently share product photos and prices manually in chat with no catalog structure or in-chat checkout.
Design a business catalog attached to the profile, an in-chat browsing carousel, and in-chat checkout or a payment link handoff.
Sequence catalog and browsing first, since payments require heavier regulatory and banking integration that varies by market.
Define success as businesses with an active catalog, catalog-to-chat inquiry rate, and chat-to-purchase conversion.

Grounds the design in WhatsApp's real core use case, SMB-to-customer chat commerce in emerging markets, rather than a generic storefront.
Sequences catalog before payments, given how regulatory complexity for in-app payments varies drastically by country.
Ties success metrics to the actual commerce funnel, catalog to inquiry to purchase.

Designing a full ecommerce platform with cart and payments from day one, ignoring regional payment regulation.
Not grounding the design in WhatsApp's actual core SMB-chat use case.

How would you handle payments differently across markets with different regulations?
How would you prevent this feature from being used for scams or spam catalogs?