Event rental · Shopware migration

Project: Xtreme Events

RENT EVENT MODULES VIA REQUEST BASKET

Xtreme Events from Mönchengladbach has been renting out event modules for 25 years, from bull riding and the XXL human table football to a Formula 1 simulator. For the relaunch we moved the entire rental fleet from WordPress to Shopware 6. Nothing is bought in the new shop. Customers put the modules they want into a request basket and receive a quote within 24 hours.

Rental catalog
Request basket
SEO & GEO

The project at a glance

Client: Xtreme Events
Starting point: Moving the event-module catalog from WordPress to Shopware 6 as a shop without a checkout, where customers request modules. This included migrating 349 modules and 2,549 images, 934 redirects and optimization for search engines and AI systems in three languages.
Services: E-Commerce
Location: Mönchengladbach · Shopware agency Mönchengladbach
Stack: Shopware

Xtreme Events category page for sports games

Event grounds with modules from Xtreme Events

REQUEST BASKET INSTEAD OF CART

A bull-riding module has no fixed price. What ends up in the quote depends on where the event takes place, how long it runs and whether Xtreme Events staff should be on site. That is why the shop has no checkout, no customer account, no payment and no shipping.

Instead, customers collect their modules in the request basket. For each module they decide whether to rent it with supervision or run it themselves, and they can tick a box to have it branded with their own logo. The total at the bottom of the basket is deliberately just a guide value.

The team then calculates the final price individually for every event.

Xtreme Events request basket on tablet and smartphone

Product detail page Human Kicker XXL with price tiers

Xtreme Events request basket with price tiers and branding option

FEWER FOLLOW-UP QUESTIONS

For multi-day events, requests used to arrive with a single time span, such as Friday 10 a.m. to Sunday 5 p.m. Whether the modules should also run at night was something sales had to clarify by phone every time. Today the form asks for separate times for each event day. Anyone playing the same hours every day copies the times from the first day with one click. Every request gets its own number, sales receives it as a clearly structured email and the customer gets a confirmation. In the Shopware admin we replaced the order overview with an inbox for requests, where the team maintains status and internal notes and can reply directly.

AT A GLANCE

Not everyone already knows which modules they want. Anyone still undecided answers three short questions about occasion, location and date in the guided consultation, and the team puts together a suitable package from that.

Request basket with guide value
Prices with and without supervision
Branding option per module
Times for every event day
Guided consultation in three steps
Inbox for requests in the admin
German, English and French

Guided consultation and request form from Xtreme Events

Simulators category page with filters and guide prices

RELAUNCH WITHOUT RANKING LOSS

Over the years the Xtreme Events WordPress site had built up strong organic visibility, reaching 6.1 million impressions in Google Search Console. A platform change alters almost every URL and puts exactly those rankings at risk. The migration was therefore based on a complete inventory. A crawl, the XML sitemap and Search Console each cover only part of the indexed pages; only cross-checking them revealed the actual stock of 1,125 legacy URLs. Among them were pages with notable search volume that did not appear in any other source.

One focus was keyword cannibalisation. On the old site, numerous landing pages sat next to category pages on the same topic and risked competing with each other for the same search terms. We systematically identified these conflicting pairs during the migration and evaluated them with ranking data from Semrush and Google Search Console. Each pair was decided individually. If one page clearly ranked stronger, a redirect consolidates the signals on it. If both pages had their place, sharpened page titles separate their roles. Pages that demonstrably did not compete with each other were left untouched so that no existing traffic is lost. Internal links were updated with every change.

In addition, we tracked down internal links that were encoded in CMS content and invisible to crawlers, converted them in the source and aligned canonical and hreflang tags across all three languages.

VISIBLE IN AI ANSWERS

Search queries are increasingly shifting to AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews. What counts there is not the position in a results list but whether a provider is named and described correctly in the generated answer. Alongside search engine optimization, we therefore set Xtreme Events up for Generative Engine Optimization.

The biggest challenge lay in the business model. Standard shop markup describes products with price, shipping and right of return and would suggest to an AI an online purchase that does not exist at Xtreme Events. The structured data is therefore tailored specifically to the rental model. An editorially written llms.txt explains the pricing logic, request process and service area for language models.