About ASOS
ASOS is a global online fashion retailer serving customers across international markets.
During this project, ASOS was re-architecting its ecommerce platform around microservices while continuing to support localised customer experiences across different countries.
That meant changes to the underlying platform had to work not just technically, but across the languages, currencies, promotions, and customer journeys specific to each market.
The challenge
ASOS was tackling two complex changes at the same time: rebuilding its platform around microservices and making sure the experience worked across nine different international markets.
Each market introduced its own requirements around language, currency, tax, delivery, promotions, and customer journeys.
At the same time, moving to microservices meant an issue in one service or integration could surface somewhere else in the end-to-end experience.
Something that worked correctly in the UK could still fail in Poland, the UAE, or Armenia.
ASOS needed enough testing coverage to find those differences across every release, without assuming that success in one market meant success everywhere.
Our solution
Digivante ran seven testing cycles combining large-scale localisation testing with exploratory testing across ASOS’ microservices and core ecommerce journeys.
Testing covered:
- Microservices and integrations: Checking service integrations, cross-service behaviour, and data consistency
- End-to-end ecommerce journeys: Product discovery, basket, and checkout
- Localisation: Validating language, currency, regional promotions, and market-specific journeys
- Market-specific functionality: Checking whether features behaved correctly in each location rather than relying on representative-market testing
- International coverage: Testing across the UK, Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, Denmark, UAE, Armenia, Ukraine, and New Zealand
Across the programme, Digivante involved 870 testers and delivered 570 workdays of testing.
That scale allowed ASOS to validate each market individually while continuing to test the underlying services and integrations supporting the customer experience.
The results
Digivante identified 325 defects across the seven testing cycles. Of those, 44 were classified as high severity.
Findings included localisation failures, checkout interruptions, service integration faults, and functionality that worked correctly in one country but failed in another.
That market-specific coverage mattered. An issue confined to a customer journey in Armenia, Poland, or the UAE would not necessarily have appeared in UK testing. By validating all nine markets individually, ASOS gained evidence of how the new platform behaved across the different environments its customers actually used.
The programme delivered:
- Seven testing cycles across the transformation
- 870 testers providing large-scale international coverage
- 570 workdays of testing delivered
- 325 defects identified
- 44 high-severity issues uncovered
- Nine international markets validated individually
325
defects identified
44
high-severity defects
9
international markets tested
The takeaway
A platform can work in one market and still fail in another.
That becomes particularly important when an ecommerce architecture is changing underneath customer journeys that also vary by language, currency, promotions, delivery, and local requirements.
For ASOS, testing the transformation meant looking at both sides of the problem: whether the microservices and integrations behaved correctly, and whether customers could still complete important journeys in each individual market.
Seven testing cycles uncovered 325 defects, including 44 high-severity issues, before those problems reached customers.
For international ecommerce teams, the useful question is not simply whether the platform works.
It is whether it works in every market where customers need to use it.
FAQs
Why did ASOS bring in Digivante?
ASOS was re-architecting its ecommerce platform around microservices while supporting localised experiences across nine international markets. It needed broad testing coverage across both the underlying services and the customer journeys that depended on them.
What did Digivante test for ASOS?
Testing covered microservices integrations, end-to-end flows, data consistency, product discovery, basket, checkout, language, currency, regional promotions, and other market-specific functionality.
How large was the ASOS testing programme?
Digivante ran seven testing cycles involving 870 testers and 570 workdays of testing across nine international markets. The programme identified 325 defects, including 44 high-severity issues.
Why does multi-market ecommerce testing matter?
An ecommerce journey can work correctly in one country and fail in another because of differences in localisation, currency, promotions, integrations, or market-specific functionality. Testing each market individually helps identify problems that representative testing in one country may not expose.
