What API and data model would support a new Logistics workflow for third-party sellers

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Amazon is a commerce, logistics, media, devices, and cloud company; its products include Marketplace, Prime, Prime Video, Alexa devices, ads, fulfillment, and AWS.

Amazon wants to enable a new logistics workflow for third-party sellers who need to move inventory or customer orders through Amazon-managed or Amazon-integrated fulfillment services. Sellers may be using Seller Central, their own warehouse systems, or third-party tools, and they need a reliable way to create shipments, share package details, receive labels or pickup instructions, track shipment status, and reconcile exceptions.

In this Technical PM interview question, you are being asked to define the API surface and data model needed to support that workflow. The focus is not on writing code, but on showing how you would translate seller needs, logistics operations, and system constraints into clear product requirements that engineering teams could build against.

Your response should account for the realities of Amazon-scale logistics: many seller types, high shipment volume, strict data accuracy, operational handoffs, exception handling, security, and backward compatibility with existing seller and fulfillment systems.

The technical product design should consider:

- The primary seller workflow from shipment creation through delivery, cancellation, or exception resolution

- The core API capabilities required for sellers and partner systems to interact with the logistics workflow

- The key data entities, identifiers, relationships, and lifecycle states that must be represented

- Required integrations with seller tools, fulfillment systems, carrier services, billing, tracking, and notifications

- Reliability expectations, idempotency, error handling, rate limits, retries, and versioning

- Privacy, authentication, authorization, and data access boundaries for third-party sellers

- Observability needs such as audit logs, status history, operational metrics, and failure alerts

- Rollout considerations, migration from existing workflows, and safeguards for seller and customer impact

The goal is to demonstrate how you would design a technically sound, seller-friendly logistics platform capability that supports operational scale while giving third-party sellers clear, dependable control over their logistics workflow.