Intershop Communications AG is a public

e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) refers to commercial activities including the electronic buying or selling products and services which are conducted on online platforms or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile co ...

company headquartered in

Jena Jena (; ) is a List of cities and towns in Germany, city in Germany 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 in ...

Thuringia Thuringia (; officially the Free State of Thuringia, ) is one of Germany, Germany's 16 States of Germany, states. With 2.1 million people, it is 12th-largest by population, and with 16,171 square kilometers, it is 11th-largest in area. Er ...

, Germany. Their clients include corporations such as HP,

BMW Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, trading as BMW Group (commonly abbreviated to BMW (), sometimes anglicised as Bavarian Motor Works), is a German multinational manufacturer of vehicles and motorcycles headquartered in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. Th ...

, Würth, and

Deutsche Telekom Deutsche Telekom AG (, ; often just Telekom, DTAG or DT; stylised as ·T·) is a partially state-owned German telecommunications company headquartered in Bonn and the largest telecommunications provider in Europe by revenue. It was formed in 199 ...

. 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, Karsten Schneider, and Wilfried Beeck. In 1995, the company created the first German online store. That same year, they created "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 th ...

) and became one of the leading software developers for this early market. Intershop is one of the best examples of the "

New Economy The New Economy refers to the ongoing development of the American economic system. It evolved from the notions of the classical economy via the transition from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy, and has been driven by ...

bubble" in Germany. The company value rose to $11 billion (US$) in 2000 and quickly fell to

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

levels. Low earning warnings by Intershop caused widespread losses for other tech companies; in one instance, SAP's

stock Stocks (also capital stock, or sometimes interchangeably, shares) consist of all the Share (finance), shares by which ownership of a corporation or company is divided. A single share of the stock means fractional ownership of the corporatio ...

fell by 8%. In 2001, an Intershop earnings warning spread through the sector, causing the Stock exchange segment Neuer Markt (NEMAX 50) to slump nearly 10%. The company barely survived the crash but could keep operating and continue the development of products. 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. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

), ePages, and Demandware (later acquired by Salesforce.com).

References

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