About AllSaints
AllSaints is a British fashion retailer established in 1994. The brand reaches customers internationally through stores, concessions, franchises, and digital platforms, with collections spanning womenswear, menswear, and accessories.
For AllSaints, ecommerce is an important part of how customers discover, browse, and buy from the brand. The team wanted to take a proactive look at the experience rather than wait for a specific customer-facing problem to dictate where testing should focus.
The challenge
Not every QA project starts because something has already gone wrong. AllSaints wanted to understand the overall quality of its ecommerce site and find out where functionality, usability, and the shopping experience could be tightened.
There was no single feature or known defect to investigate. The challenge was much broader: look across the journeys customers relied on every day and identify issues that might otherwise be difficult to spot.
That meant testing beyond whether individual functions technically worked. From finding a product and navigating categories to using search and filters, managing an account, adding to basket, and completing checkout, AllSaints needed a clearer picture of what customers were actually encountering across the experience.
Our solution
Digivante carried out a broad exploratory audit across AllSaints’ key ecommerce journeys.
Rather than restricting testers to a narrow set of predefined test cases, exploratory testing gave them room to move through the site as customers would, investigate unexpected behaviour, and follow issues as they emerged.
Our testing covered:
- Product discovery: Homepage, category browsing, search, and filtering
- Key conversion journeys: Basket and checkout
- Account management: Testing important logged-in customer journeys
- Usability and navigation: Identifying areas of friction or confusing behaviour
- Mobile responsiveness: Checking how the experience behaved on mobile
- Exploratory coverage: Giving testers scope to investigate issues outside a rigid test script
The goal wasn’t simply to generate a long bug list.
It was to give AllSaints useful evidence about the quality of the experience, with findings classified by severity so the team could see what warranted immediate attention and what could be prioritised as part of future development.
The results
Digivante identified 197 issues across the AllSaints ecommerce experience. Crucially, those 197 findings did not represent 197 equally serious problems.
Most were lower-severity usability or presentation issues. Just one was classified as high severity and required more immediate attention. That gave AllSaints something much more useful than a raw defect count: a prioritised picture of site quality.
The high-severity issue could be addressed, while the wider set of findings gave the team a structured backlog of opportunities to improve the experience over time.
• 197 issues identified across the ecommerce experience
• One high-severity issue requiring more immediate attention
• Broad coverage across product discovery, basket, checkout, account management, usability, and mobile
• Prioritised findings separating more significant issues from smaller improvements
• A proactive view of quality rather than waiting for a known customer-facing problem to emerge
197
issues identified
1
high-severity issue
6
key ecommerce journey areas reviewed
The takeaway
A high defect count doesn’t tell you much on its own.
What matters is what those issues are, where they sit in the customer journey, and which ones deserve attention first.
For AllSaints, proactive testing uncovered one high-severity issue alongside a much larger set of smaller usability and presentation findings. That distinction gave the team a clearer picture of the quality of its ecommerce experience and where future effort could be focused.
And that is the value of testing before there is an obvious fire to put out.
You don’t always need a failed release, broken checkout, or drop in conversion to justify looking more closely at quality. Sometimes the useful question is simply: what are our customers encountering that we haven’t seen yet?
FAQs
Why did AllSaints bring in Digivante?
AllSaints wanted a proactive, independent view of the quality of its ecommerce experience rather than investigating one known problem. The aim was to identify issues across key customer journeys and understand where attention should be prioritised.
What did Digivante test for AllSaints?
Digivante tested key ecommerce journeys including product discovery, basket, checkout, and account management. The audit also looked at usability, navigation, search, filtering, and mobile responsiveness.
How many issues did Digivante identify?
The audit identified 197 issues in total. Most were lower-severity usability or presentation findings, while one was classified as high severity and required more immediate attention.
Why carry out proactive ecommerce QA if there isn’t a known problem?
Testing doesn’t have to start with a failed release or obvious customer issue. A broader quality audit can help ecommerce teams uncover defects, friction, and usability problems across important journeys before one particular problem dictates where attention is focused.
