payand.help is a Ukrainian charity auction platform. Anyone can put up a lot - a handmade item, an experience, a meeting - choose who the money goes to, and let people bid for it. The winner pays the chosen cause directly: a volunteer's bank jar, a charitable foundation or an animal shelter. The platform is free for both authors and bidders and never handles the money itself.
The brief
- Let any registered user create an auction from the front end, without touching the WordPress admin
- Real bidding: current price, bid history and a clear end time
- Keep authors and bidders informed when they are outbid and when an auction ends
- Build trust: real profiles, public results and recognition for the most generous donors
- A warm, friendly look that fits a charity project, in Ukrainian
What we built
A custom WordPress theme and our own auction plugin, built from scratch - no off-the-shelf auction or marketplace plugins.
Auction plugin
- Bids stored in a dedicated database table, placed over AJAX with server-side validation, so the price on the page is always current
- Public bid history with masked emails to protect bidders' privacy
- Notifications by email and through a Telegram bot: new bids for the author, "you were outbid" for other participants, and results for the winner and the author when an auction closes
- Scheduled background checks that close finished auctions and send reminders before the end
- Private auctions that stay out of the public catalog
- User stats and rating: auctions created, bids placed and lots won, plus a "Top Philanthropist" leaderboard
Custom theme
- Illustrated homepage with a three-step "create an auction, set a goal, get the funds" flow
- Front-end auction form with photo uploads, gallery and automatic image optimization through Cloudinary
- Auction catalog with sorting and status badges, auction pages with live bidding, fund pages and user profiles
- Sign-in with Telegram or a phone number; profiles linked to social accounts so people know who they deal with
- Front-end code in TypeScript with a webpack build
Support and growth
We keep developing and maintaining the platform: new features, fixes, server hosting and deploys of the theme and plugin from Git.
Result
A free, self-service platform where anyone can turn a thing or an experience into a donation in a few minutes - with live bidding, automatic notifications and a transparent path from the winning bid straight to the cause.
