Years Online 2007-2011
In its heyday, Horror Mall was the largest independent retailer of horror books, movies and other items. Horror Mall was an LLC formed by Shane Staley which served as an actual virtual mall that online shops from several vendors operated within. From the beginning, his partnership with Larry Roberts, who ran the Bloodletting Books shop, offered genre collectors a one-stop shop to build a world-class library of limited edition books. The core software was X-Cart self-hosted software that Staley extremely modified via php to allow the expansion of custom features on the backend to accommodate a multiple vendor ecommerce operation. Until the housing market crash and the great recession began, the volume of books moved through this website was unmatched. Years after the recession, the collectors market receded with pressure from Amazon and other retailers with the eBook boom, fueled by Kindle.