Mammutmarsch runs extreme hiking events — 30 to 100 kilometers, often overnight — across Germany, Austria, Denmark, and Spain. What started as a single-market WooCommerce store in 2020 has grown into an events business processing tens of thousands of bookings a year, coordinating thousands of on-the-day volunteers, and running on a platform built to handle 452.1K monthly average total visits without slowing down.
NextG has been Mammutmarsch’s development partner since day one — not on a single project, but across six years of continuous growth: 1,500+ completed tasks, three live country sites, and a backend architecture rebuilt more than once to keep pace with demand.
Annual order volume has grown tenfold across five years of partnership.
Every fix, feature, and improvement delivered across six years of partnership.
Volunteers sign up and get matched to shifts across every event weekend.
Challenges
When NextG started with Mammutmarsch in 2020, the technical footprint matched the business: one country, one WooCommerce store. Over the following six years, yearly order volume grew 10x, the site’s monthly traffic passed 452.1K average montly total visits, and the events calendar expanded from Germany into Denmark and Spain. Growth at that scale doesn’t just mean “more of the same” — it breaks assumptions the original architecture was never built for.
The clearest example: as booking volume climbed, a core part of the system — how the site stored which “starting group” (time slot) each participant selected — was still living inside WordPress’s generic postmeta table. That table isn’t built for this kind of load, and during peak registration windows the site would slow to a crawl or time out completely, right when thousands of people were trying to book at once.
On top of the technical growth, almost all of Mammutmarsch’s events take place on weekends. That means the moments something breaks — a payment gateway hiccup, a mass-mailing block, a booking edge case — are exactly the moments the team can least afford downtime, and exactly when most support providers are unreachable.
The single biggest technical undertaking was moving starting-group data out of postmeta and into a dedicated set of custom database tables, backed by a new REST API. NextG designed the new structure, migrated hundreds of thousands of existing records without disrupting live registrations, and rebuilt the booking flow on top of it. The platform now handles thousands of simultaneous bookings without the timeouts that used to threaten registration days.
NextG had already rebuilt Mammutmarsch’s core ecosystem — event booking, the “My Events” participant hub, volunteer sign-up, gift vouchers, and payments — for the German site. For international growth, the team extended that same ecosystem into two new markets, first launching the Danish site, then the Spanish site. Each launch meant full localization: translated content, local currencies and VAT logic, and country-specific marketing tracking (TikTok, Pinterest, Microsoft Ads, Meta CAPI) so the marketing team could measure performance market by market.
On the operations side, NextG automated processes that used to run manually: PDF invoice generation for every order type across three countries, monthly CSV exports for tax consultants, and a volunteer management system that syncs shift sign-ups to Google Sheets in real time and automatically emails reward vouchers once an event wraps up.
And because most of Mammutmarsch’s events happen on weekends, NextG built its support rhythm around event days rather than a standard business week — staying reachable on Saturdays and Sundays when a booking issue, a mailing block, or a checkout bug needs a same-day fix, not a Monday one.
Our partnership has grown alongside Mammutmarsch’s business, resulting in 1,500+ completed tasks since 2020 — from platform-defining rebuilds to the small fixes that keep 452.1K monthly average total visits moving smoothly.
The platform now serves 452.1K monthly average total visits and absorbs 10x in yearly order growth without a rebuild, thanks to the custom booking architecture NextG designed and migrated live.
Across six years of live support, NextG has been reachable every event weekend — the exact moments when a fast response matters most to thousands of participants at once.
one partnership, many chapters
Six years and 1,500+ tasks don’t fit in a single case study. We’ve broken the biggest pieces of this partnership into their own deep dives:
Working with NextG gives me confidence in our plans. All our requests are promptly addressed. If there is a problem, NextG always solves it, even if it's a weekend. Which is crucial, because our events start on the weekends. And in general we always get answers from them very quickly.
Full review here