Define scenario and workload distribution
Depending on the similarity of your target test site to the production environment, you would need to scale the workload to suit your test environment. In addition to defining the easier aspects of the workload, such as the number of users (shoppers, administrators, and so on), scheduled jobs, and response time and throughput expectations, you also need to define scenarios based on your site flow, their relative weight, such as the browse-buy ratio, and their relative length, such as how many products a shopper will go through or how many search queries will be executed before placing an order. An accurate representation of the site flow, scenario weight, and length is important, as it impacts any performance results.
Relative weights can be defined as a percentage of total site traffic. One common and easy to make mistake is to not have the total traffic add up to 100%.
In addition to the workload generated by human intervention, be that from the shoppers or from the various administrators, we also need to define any other modes of content update such as the backend updates, scheduled jobs, and so on.