How 21RUN doubled conversion rate without extra marketing spending
Meet 21RUN, a leading sneakers and sportswear retailer serving customers in Germany and across the EU.
With over 250,000 products available, the company processes more than 500 orders daily — and up to three times more during peak seasons.
The scale and market leadership demand a stable, fully synchronised backend.
In reality, the company was facing several issues that led to lost revenue.
Popular products that 21RUN expected to sell out were left sitting in inventory. Aggressive catalogue page caching, introduced to improve load times, caused website stock to drift out of sync with actual availability. As a result, customers were shown products that were already out of stock, rather than what was truly available.
“Marketing colleagues noticed that pages were not displayed correctly. Management didn’t know how many products were affected. This insecurity was unacceptable.
They wanted a clear picture of stock and a website they could trust. They wanted to focus on improving marketing campaigns without worrying whether the website would deliver correctly at any moment,” says Ravindra Abeynaike, ex-CTO at 21RUN.
At the same time, the servers were nearing capacity. Opening a page or clicking a button took two to three seconds, causing frustrated customers to leave.
Result
After a comprehensive system audit, we removed an outdated caching approach, optimized the server infrastructure, refactored the backend, and implemented real-time synchronization of inventory and pricing.
The result was impactful.
Double the revenue with zero marketing effort
With Catomize, 21RUN increased its conversion rate from 1.5% to 3% without investing in marketing campaigns. The same traffic began generating twice as many orders, doubling the revenue.
“There is always a strong relationship between performance and conversion — faster checkout reduces friction and annoyance. However, we were not expecting such a staggering increase in revenue,” comments Ravindra Abeynaike, ex-CTO at 21RUN
A smooth customer experience, all year round
Response time reduced to 50 milliseconds. Pages now load instantly, significantly reducing bounce rates.
The website remains stable even during peak seasons, when traffic spikes by up to three times.
“The website was more resilient, especially against aggressive web crawlers. We had a huge catalog and three shops running on the same Magento instance. Bots crawling aggressively could create a heavy load.
With Catomize, it wasn’t a problem anymore. The site delivered constantly regardless of bot traffic,” shares Ravindra Abeynaike, ex-CTO at 21RUN.
Sales until sold out — not sold-out sales
After implementing Catomize, phantom stock was eliminated. Cart abandonment dropped significantly, meaning each visit was far more likely to result in a purchase.
“The combination of high accuracy, fast response times, and resilience was the main reason we chose the solution,” sums up Ravindra Abeynaike, ex-CTO at 21RUN.
Want results like this? Get started with Catomize
