Load Testing — Commerce

Overview

Load testing e-commerce applications requires more than hammering an endpoint with concurrent requests. Realistic test scenarios simulate actual user behavior: browsing the catalog, searching for products, adding items to a cart, and completing checkout — including the think time between actions. This skill covers building realistic shopping scenarios in k6 and Artillery, interpreting results to find bottlenecks, and establishing performance baselines before major sales events.

When to Use This Skill

• When preparing for a flash sale, Black Friday, or seasonal traffic spike
• When deploying a major infrastructure change (new database, CDN, checkout service)
• When establishing performance SLOs and baselines for a new storefront
• When a production incident was caused by load and you need to reproduce it in staging
• When a new checkout feature is being released and its performance impact is unknown

Core Instructions

Step 1: Determine your platform and what you can test