The guest picks a date, enters their card, clicks to pay, and lands on an error page. Ten minutes later they email you asking whether they have tickets. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they have two sets. Sometimes they have nothing and their bank shows a pending charge anyway.
An error after an Altru event ticket purchase rarely means one specific thing. The useful question isn’t “what does the message mean” so much as “which step failed, and did the sale actually land?” This article walks through how to answer that, what tends to cause it, and how to keep a single glitch from turning into a refund headache.
First, find out whether the sale exists
Before you troubleshoot anything, settle the guest’s question. An online ticket purchase has several steps: the order is built, the payment is authorized, the sale is saved in Altru, and a confirmation is shown and emailed. An error can appear at any of them, and the later it happens, the more likely the purchase actually went through.
- Search the constituent. Look up the guest by name and email. Check their revenue and recent sales for an event or advance sales order around the time they tried to buy. Also search for possible duplicate constituent records, since a guest who typed their email slightly differently may have been saved as a new person.
- Check the event’s registrants or sales. If capacity dropped by the guest’s ticket count at that time, the order probably saved.
- Check the payment processor. Look for an authorization or settled transaction matching the amount and time. A charge with no matching Altru sale is the case that needs the fastest attention.
- Ask the guest what they saw. A screenshot, the time, the device, and the browser are worth more than any description. “It just said error” tells you very little; the exact wording and page address often tell you which step broke.
From there you’re in one of three situations: the sale saved and only the confirmation failed, the guest retried and now has duplicates, or a payment exists with no sale behind it. Handle each differently, and don’t tell the guest to “just try again” until you know which one you’re in.
Common causes worth checking
The confirmation step failed, not the purchase
When the error shows up on what should be the thank-you page, the sale is often fine. Look at the web form’s confirmation settings and any redirect or custom confirmation page it points to. A redirect to a page that has moved, been unpublished, or sits on a different domain with its own issues can produce an error after payment. The same goes for confirmation emails: if the email template references something that no longer exists, check whether the failure is limited to the email rather than the sale.
The event changed while the guest was checking out
Events sell out, price types get edited, and time slots get closed while someone is halfway through a form. If a guest’s cart no longer matches what’s available when they submit, an error is a reasonable outcome. Ask whether anyone changed the event, its capacity, or its price types around the time of the failure. Errors clustered on one popular event or date point in this direction.
Session timeouts and the back button
Guests who leave a checkout open, come back later, or use the browser’s back button after paying can hit stale pages. This is also how duplicate purchases happen: the first submit worked, the page errored or hung, and the guest clicked pay again. If you see two identical orders minutes apart, this is almost always the story.
Embedding and browser issues
If your Altru web form is embedded inside your own website rather than linked directly, test the direct form link too. Embedded forms can behave differently with privacy settings, ad blockers, and some mobile browsers. If the direct link works and the embedded version fails, the problem is the embed, not the event.
Payment declines that look like errors
A declined card or a failed address check should produce a clear message, but guests don’t always read it that way. If the processor shows a decline at that time, the “error” may simply be a decline worded in a way the guest didn’t understand.
Reproduce it before you escalate
Try the same event, date, ticket types, and quantity yourself, ideally in a sandbox or test environment if you have one, or with a low-cost test purchase you refund afterward. Try it on a phone and a desktop, embedded and direct. Write down exactly what you did and what you saw.
If you can reproduce it, or the guest’s charge has no matching sale in Altru, open a case with Blackbaud support. Include the event, the time of the failed purchase, the form URL, the exact error text, and whether the payment shows in the processor. That’s the fastest path to an answer, and they can see server-side detail that administrators can’t. If you’re not sure whether a particular setting behaves the way you expect, ask them directly rather than guessing.
Cleaning up after a failed purchase
- Sale saved, no confirmation: resend or manually send the tickets, and tell the guest plainly that their order is fine.
- Duplicates: confirm with the guest which order to keep, refund the other in Altru so revenue and capacity are corrected, and note the record so the next person understands what happened.
- Charge with no sale: work out with your processor and Blackbaud support whether the authorization will drop off or needs a refund. Then either complete the sale manually or make sure the guest isn’t charged.
- Duplicate constituent created: merge it now, while you remember why it exists.
Keep a simple log of these incidents: date, event, what the guest saw, and which of the outcomes above it was. Three entries that all involve the same event or the same browser tell you more than any single report.
Another option for the checkout itself
If post-purchase errors keep coming back to the web form experience itself, some organizations replace the guest-facing checkout while keeping Altru underneath. Social Good’s Checkouts is a branded, mobile-friendly checkout for tickets, memberships, and donations that writes the sale back to Altru, with Apple Pay and Google Pay available. It doesn’t remove the need to diagnose the issues above, but it changes the page guests actually pay on.
Quick answers
Was the guest charged if they saw an error?
Possibly. Check both Altru and your payment processor before answering. An error late in the process often means the sale went through.
Should the guest try again?
Only after you’ve confirmed no sale or charge exists. Retrying is the most common source of duplicate orders.
