I would add that serializing to a file probably would influence your design, but should only be used if the list is not going to grow much once created. Binary serialization can be done without worrying about how the classes are designed, though, so either approach would work fine. Whether there is some advantage to one over the other as far as serialization is concerned, I really doubt. However, if you expect the number of components or products to increase steadily over time, then it certainly sounds like a DB would be more appropriate than any kind of file serialization.

Also, the ID for the component shouldn't be a string. It should be an integer unless you have sound reason to use something like a GUID. Integers will be much faster for looking up than strings would be.