Conference registration website: lost tickets

A delegate picks the early ticket because the page says it is cheaper before a deadline. Then the attendee form asks for a name, a job title and a dietary note, and the page sends them on to payment. Somewhere in that sequence the early price can fall away, if the page reads the deadline from the payment date rather than the purchase date, or if the early tier was never linked to the ticket that was selected. The delegate sees a higher total than the one they agreed to, and no line on the page explains the change.

• Does the total on the payment step match the ticket price shown before the attendee form?
• When a discount code fails, does the page say whether it expired, is for members or was mistyped?
• Are invoice, purchase order and tax fields shown only when a delegate asks for them?
• Can an attendee name with a hyphen, an accent or a space go through without an error?

A tiered price is only honest if the tier stays attached to the ticket from the first click to the receipt. Many registration pages store the choice in one place and rebuild the total in another, so the number a delegate agreed to and the number the payment step charges can drift apart. The drift is worst near a deadline, when a visitor who started on the early tier finishes after the cutoff. Test the path with a purchase started just before a deadline you set in a test copy. Then compare the total at each step with the one you saw first, line by line.

A code field is a small form inside the form, and it fails quietly in more ways than the owner expects. A code can be expired, limited to members, restricted to one ticket type or typed in a way the system does not match. Each of these shows the same red box. A delegate who knows their code is right assumes the page is broken and writes to the organizer, or gives up. Show which reason applies, and keep the code in the field after a failure, so the delegate can fix one character without retyping the whole code.

Employers want an invoice, a purchase order number and sometimes a tax field, and those fields belong to a minority of delegates. A page that shows them to everyone pushes the typical delegate through questions they cannot answer. Groups add another layer, because the form repeats the attendee block for each person and then asks for one contact at the end. A visitor who fills in three attendees and meets an error in the last block may lose the earlier entries, and each lost entry feels like starting again. Test a group of three, and check that the earlier entries survive a failure at the end.

Conference pages add tiers, workshops and sponsor passes, and each addition can break the link between the early price and the ticket a delegate selects. Rerun the same purchase after every change to tiers, deadlines or codes, and run it again on the day the early price ends. A registration behind a login needs a test account that you give the run, so the run can reach the payment step.