Creating an Online Auction Plugin on WordPress for raising funds for Charity

Fund raising events require a lot of planning and labor to contact and follow-up with donors, to organize the auction items and arrange them on tables with bid sheets.

What if there was a online auction plugin on WordPress for charity that could integrate an auction onto a page of your existing site to raise money for charity?

Such a plugin would enable event attendees to view your catalog items and chose their favorites before your event and also place their bids.

 

The WordPres page where the auctions will be displayed would consist of:

• A table displaying the list of products.
• For each product there is a picture of the product and a title which is hyperlink to product page.
• Each product is succeeded by two bid boxes- a ‘starting bid‘ box and a ‘current bid box’ which tracks the latest bid amount, and first name and last initial of the last bidder.
• There is also a ‘Bid Now’ button opening three required fields asking bidders to submit their full name, account code, bid amount and email-id.
• In order to track how much money has been raised, we have a tracker at the top of the page, which calculates the sum of all of the current bids.
• The plugin records all the information collected during the bidding process i.e. the full name, account code, bid amount and email-id except the payment processing and shipping will is handled internally.
• Users need not login or create a WordPress account in order to bid.

Of course, these are just the basics. There’s a lot more to the auction that just closed. There are two distinct parts of running an online charity auction.

1. The first is getting things set up right so you can display your items and accept bids.
2. The second is getting people to show up at the online auction and actually place bids.

Coming to the architecture of such a plugin:

The Plugin would consist of three modules: The Back-end, the managing auctions and the front end. We’ve already discussed the back end and managing of auctions in detail in our previous post on offline charity auctions here. 

We would also need to create a Settings page consisting of Timezone, Currency and Payment Gateway. Integrating Timezone and currency is required for global users who need access to the plugin.

Settings:

• Timezone: Your blog’s time zone is set to Coordinated Universal Time, UTC by default, which is in London, UK. If you live in a different area of the World you may change this option. You can find the time zones of many cities here.
• Currency: On Currency Settings page you can easily do currency conversions and determine the product cost within seconds.
• Payment Gateway: Payment Gateway is integrated to receive payments from bidders and ask admin for API credentials.

Front End:

1. The plugin will provide a shortcode which should be placed in a WordPress page.
2. In this page, the front end will show auction details.
3. The bid now button will pop up a window where the bidders will be asked for details such as full name, account code, bids, email (if the user is not registered)
4. We’ll need to implement a progress bar like section to show ‘Money Raised’ section. This can be done by creating a simple calculator for it like – ‘sum of current bids’ out of ‘sum of reserved price’ for all auctions.

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