An online shopping portal requires an efficient inventory management system to store, update, and monitor information about products available for sale. An Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) approach is suitable for developing such a system because it represents each product as an object containing both data and operations. The system can be designed around an `Item` class that stores details such as item name, item ID, price, stock count, category, and other necessary information. The class can also provide methods for adding stock, reducing stock after a sale, updating the price, checking availability, and displaying item details. For the purpose of designing the application, some reasonable assumptions can be made. Every item has a unique item ID. The item name is a string, the price is represented using a numeric data type such as `double`, and stock count is represented using an integer. A product is considered available when its stock count is greater than zero. Stock cannot become negative. The inventory may contain multiple different items, and an administrator or inventory manager can add, remove, search, and modify products. Customers can purchase items only when sufficient stock is available. The main class of the application is the `Item` class. Its attributes can be declared as private to achieve encapsulation. For example, `itemId` identifies the product uniquely, `name` stores its name, `price` stores its selling price, `stockCount` stores the number of units currently available, and `category` describes the type of product. Additional attributes such as brand, discount, or reorder level can also be included when required. A possible C++ implementation of the `Item` class is: ```cpp #include #include using namespace std; class Item { private: int itemId; string name; string category; double price; int stockCount; public: Item(int id, string n, string c, double p, int stock) { itemId = id; name = n; category = c; price = p; stockCount = stock; } int getItemId() const { return itemId; } string getName() const { return name; } double getPrice() const { return price; } int getStockCount() const { return stockCount; } void setPrice(double newPrice) { if (newPrice >= 0) price = newPrice; } void addStock(int quantity) { if (quantity > 0) stockCount += quantity; } bool sellItem(int quantity) { if (quantity <= 0 || quantity > stockCount) return false; stockCount -= quantity; return true; } bool isAvailable() const { return stockCount > 0; } void display() const { cout << "Item ID: " << itemId << endl; cout << "Name: " << name << endl; cout << "Category: " << category << endl; cout << "Price: Rs.