About us

Serhii Bulak has been building and maintaining PHP e-commerce stores since 2009. Before that, he ran his own business through the 1990s and early 2000s in telephony and computer hardware, and picked up Visual Basic and later PHP as tools for real business tasks, not for portfolio projects. That background matters: we come to e-commerce as people who understand both the code and the business processes on the client side.

From 2009 through the mid 2010s, Serhii built more than 50 turnkey PHP e-commerce projects on various CMS platforms. Around 2014 a pattern became obvious: clients had nowhere to turn once their store was launched. Developers handed over the project and moved on, the store aged, custom modifications piled up in random order, and at some point the accumulated technical SEO problems, security exposure and speed decay grew larger than the value of the store itself. That was the point where our focus shifted from new builds to modernization and long term support of stores that were already running.

In 2014 Serhii also launched our own store, Kyiv Stend (kyivstend.com.ua), which sells custom interior advertising fabricated in his own production. It runs on Joomla and VirtueMart and has been continuously modernized ever since. Today Kyiv Stend has around 2,900 URLs indexed and has gone through every major Joomla release, three PHP generations, two Schema.org reforms and a full Core Web Vitals transition. It is not a portfolio piece for clients. It is our live testbed, and every technical solution we propose has to work on our own store first.

Kyiv Stend (kyivstend.com.ua) is our own interior advertising e-commerce store, running for more than a decade on Joomla and VirtueMart. It brings in real sales and it also serves a second function: it is a live testbed where every technical decision is validated before we propose it to a client.

Over the years Kyiv Stend has been through every major Joomla release, three PHP generations, two Schema.org reforms, the full Core Web Vitals transition and all the new technical SEO requirements of the 2020s. We do not recommend any solution to a client that does not already run on our own store.

The standard market advice in 2026 goes like this: "your store is old, move it to Shopify, PrestaShop 8 or Magento 2, and everything will be fine." We disagree.

A CMS migration is a separate large project with data migration, integration rewrites, several months of SEO position loss and a budget several times larger than modernization. We take a different route: your store stays on the platform it is on, and we bring it up to current standards of security, speed, SEO and GEO.

This works because most "outdated" PHP CMS platforms (Joomla, OpenCart, PrestaShop and to a lesser extent Magento 1) actually have current, fully supported releases with PHP 8, modern Schema.org, proper structured data and adequate performance. The problem is not that the CMS is bad. The problem is that your specific store fell several generations of updates behind. We put it back on the current line without the risk of a migration.

Serhii is based in Kyiv and has been working from Ukraine for more than four years now, through the active war. He is married with three children. Loves warm sea, and that is where he tries to get away when the schedule allows. Thirty years in IT and more than fifteen in PHP e-commerce turned the technical stack from a job into a professional craft. That is exactly why eCommerceRescue is being built right now, at the point where the intuition about what to do with a stranger's store kicks in within five minutes of looking at it.

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