Auction / Bidding System

Hello,

i need your help on figuring out what might be the best solution for my problem. I did not found something like this and thats why I want to do it myself. Thank you in advance.

I have a wordpress template with user profiles/sites. I want to have an input field on these sites, where other users can give a bid. Those bids should be saved for each user and then be displayed in something like a dashboard.

I dont know exactly how i should do it. I think working with the wordpress functions add_user_meta and get_user_meta is one solution. On the other hand working with special database tables and $wpdb is possible, too. What do you think is better and why, or do you have other solutions?

Thank you again!