Lesson 84: Designing the Payment Transaction Database for Flipnzee Auctions
One of the most important milestones for any auction platform is handling what happens after an auction ends. While previous lessons focused on listings, bidding, winners, and auction management, the next stage is enabling a complete payment workflow between buyers and sellers.
In this lesson, the goal is to extend the existing transactions table so that it can support manual payment verification and future payment gateway integrations.
Objectives
- Extend the transaction database schema.
- Store payment status for every completed auction.
- Record the selected payment gateway.
- Support uploading payment proof.
- Store the payment submission timestamp.
- Prepare the plugin for future escrow and automated payment workflows.
Planned Database Enhancements
The transaction table will be extended with additional fields such as:
- payment_status
- payment_gateway
- payment_proof_id
- payment_submitted_at
These fields will allow the plugin to track the complete payment lifecycle from auction completion through seller verification.
Expected Outcome
By the end of this lesson, the payment database foundation will be ready for implementing buyer payment submission and seller/admin verification in upcoming lessons.