Draculaclothing

DraculaClothing as well as its light colored counterpart PopCorsets.com is a Magento-based online store engaged in selling best quality alternative apparel, footwear, accessories and jewelry at reasonable prices. Offering the widest range of tailor-made, unique gothic clothing items from Neo Victorian jackets, to Victorian inspired steampunk dresses, to skeleton bracelets and necklaces, to name but a few, DraculaClothing enables its numerous customers to shop outside the big box. More than that, DraculaClothing has more than 745,000 followers on Facebook, which makes it really popular and drives a flood of organic traffic to the website.

By the time we got to know Truls Stokka (the founder of DraculaClothing.com) in September 2015, he had already been running one of the most popular online alternative, steampunk and gothic clothing stores for several years. However, we identified a boatload of bottlenecks and breakpoints that took a toll on the website capacity and performance. Among the core pain points were:

Outdated website, outdated extensions and Magento version in particular.
A lack of user-friendly, visually pleasing graphic design that could draw way more customers to the website.

With this in mind, to correct a wide spectrum of bottlenecks revealed and improve poor website user experience, we were entrusted to carry out a series of upgrades. Namely, we were to:

Upgrade the outdated Magento version to the latest one.
Integrate all the extensions the latest Magento version required.
Create new web design, through modifying and customizing a standard theme to make it look unlike thousands of other templates.

So, we got down to work, and everything was just hunky-dory until in the course of database copying the website simply went down. Their server’s hard drive happened to burn out, and almost all the significant data, except for Magento files, was lost. The fault was thought to be ours though this was not the case. This could have led into a “burnout” for us as well. Fortunately, we managed to dig ourselves out of this hole and retrieve all the lost data within 24 hours. The store was luckily restored along with our reputation, which fostered a greater unity between the client and our company.

As they say, misfortunes never come alone. Yet, nobody could expect at that time that shortly thereafter we would run into one more trouble. As soon as a new slick design was developed, the checkout revealed some credit card payment form that we had never placed at this checkout. At a later date it emerged that the website had been hacked. Through entering data into this form, every customer sent their credit card details to a black hat. Crazy! We really wished the hard drive had burnt out again! As a result, the order couldn’t be paid for, nor could it be placed and processed. For obvious reasons this matter wouldn’t wait, therefore we tackled the issue head-on and removed the credit card payment option straightaway. To clarify the situation we:

Upgraded Magento to 1.9.2.4 version.
Performed all Security Patches installation.
Optimized server configuration to avoid any loopholes.
Scanned the website for all possible vulnerabilities and malware.

Nonetheless, every single time we switched back on the credit card payment option, that hostile credit card checkout form would emerge again. To that end, there was nothing left for us to do but meticulously handpick all the suspicious files in the Magento root directory and scan them for malicious code and possible backdoors. As a result of the scanning process we could eventually detect a malicious file that had presumably been left by the previous developers, and enabled a remote access to the database management. This file was successfully removed alongside with another four such-like vulnerabilities that we managed to spot in the course of the scanning.

Every pixel that we sweat, Magento performance optimization and security enhancements that we provided, all relevant extensions attuned to our client’s needs and expectations that we integrated, as well as those two unexpected global cataclysms that helped us identify and eliminate all possible loopholes and vulnerabilities, made a world of difference to the overall website performance as well as allowed us to establish way stronger relationship with DraculaClothing. Currently we are upgrading Magento to the latest 1.9.3 version and do hope we could lend a helping hand to Truls in digital marketing and promotion.