Intershop Communications AG is a public e-commerce company headquartered in

Jena Jena () is a German city and the second largest city in Thuringia. Together with the nearby cities of Erfurt and Weimar, it forms the central metropolitan area of Thuringia with approximately 500,000 inhabitants, while the city itself has a po ...

, within the state of

Thuringia Thuringia (; german: Thüringen ), officially the Free State of Thuringia ( ), is a state of central Germany, covering , the sixth smallest of the sixteen German states. It has a population of about 2.1 million. Erfurt is the capital and lar ...

in Germany. Customers include large corporations such as HP, BMW,

Würth The Würth Group (german: Würth-Gruppe, ) is a worldwide wholesaler of fasteners, screws and screw accessories, dowels, chemicals, electronic and electromechanical components, furniture and construction fittings, tools, machines, installation ma ...

, and

Deutsche Telekom Deutsche Telekom AG (; short form often just Telekom, DTAG or DT; stylised as ·T·) is a German telecommunications company that is headquartered in Bonn and is the largest telecommunications provider in Europe by revenue. Deutsche Telekom was ...

. Intershop operates in Europe, the United States of America, and the Asia-Pacific region.

Company history

Intershop was founded in 1992 as NetConsult by

Stephan Schambach Stephan Schambach (* in Erfurt) is a German entrepreneur and commerce pioneer having created the first standard software for online shopping in 1995 (Intershop). In addition to being the founder of Intershop Communications, Schambach also found ...

, Karsten Schneider, and Wilfried Beeck. In 1995, the company created the first German online store. Also in 1995, they created "Intershop Online, the first standard software for e- commerce applications", marketed in the U.S. one year later (see also

Online shopping Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce which allows consumers to directly buy goods or services from a seller over the Internet using a web browser or a mobile app. Consumers find a product of interest by visiting the website of t ...

) and continued to be one of the leading software developers for this early time of the market. Beyond that it is known as one of the prime German examples of the so-called " New Economy bubble" (company value rose to US$11 billion in 2000 only to fall to

penny stock Penny stocks are common shares of small public companies that trade for less than one dollar per share. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) uses the term "Penny stock" to refer to a security, a financial instrument which represents a ...

levels in very short time). At one point, a profit warning by Intershop caused widespread losses for other tech companies; for example, even SAP's stock fell by 8%. The company hardly survived the crash but was able to keep operating and to continue development of its products. In the process, about 30 spin-offs were founded, including Pixaco (later acquired by

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

ePages ePages is an e-commerce solution that allows merchants to create and run online shops in the cloud. The number of shops based on ePages is currently 140,000 worldwide. ePages software is regularly updated due to its Software-as-a-Service model. ...

and

Demandware Demandware is a software technology company headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts that provides a cloud-based unified e-commerce platform with mobile, AI personalization, order management capabilities, and related services for B2C and B2B r ...

(later acquired by

Salesforce.com Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, a ...

References

{{Authority control Companies based in San Francisco Software companies of Germany Jena