Each month we have a vote at WebDepend to decide on which charity should receive a small donation. Team members are able to suggest charities or I add a list of a few alternative charities - some that we've donated to before and some new ones.
In December's charity vote last year, we decided as a team to donate to 3 different charities and one of those charities was Unicef UK. Unfortunately, when it came to make the donations, the Unicef UK website kept returning an error and would not accept my payment.
I knew my credit card was fine, as I was able to submit payments for the other 2 chosen charities. After trying several times with Unicef with no luck I tried to contact them through X (formerly known as Twitter) but I never received a reply to my message.
The only instruction on the Unicef website was to try again later, and I did try again later, but still couldn't send the payment.
In the end I picked another charity, War Child, and sent the donation to them instead.
Whilst this post relates to charities it could easily also happen for ecommerce sites and any online retailer that accepts payments.
Please don't rely on customers letting you know of major problems on your site, even if they try to make contact with your organisation there is no guarantee that the message will get through to the team that can investigate and fix the problem.
Only ongoing and regular testing can make sure that important systems are working correctly and reduce issues of this nature. Unfortunately in this case, Unicef lost out on a donation due to a website problem, who knows how many donations they didn't receive.
