A chronicle built from registers, court records, trade press and academic work.
xt:Commerce began in 2002 as an open-source shop system by Guido Winger and Mario Zanier and became one of the best-known e-commerce solutions in the German-speaking market. This page traces that history, with verifiable sources for every step.
Guido Winger and Mario Zanier began developing xt:Commerce in 2002, building on the open-source system osCommerce. This is documented by several contemporary sources: a 2005 diploma thesis, the 2006 thesis at VWA Wiesbaden, which expressly names both developers as the creators, and a 2007 partner announcement.
The project was initially run by the XT-Commerce GbR in Eschweiler, from late 2003 under the name Winger & Zanier. In 2004 the partnership moved to Hamburg. Archived legal notices and project pages in the Internet Archive document these steps.
The source code carried the notice "created by Mario Zanier & Guido Winger". Preserved code mirrors and the archived credits page from 2004 keep that attribution to this day, and a SourceForge project for xt:Commerce was registered in April 2004.
As early as 2005, Galileo Computing published a German technical book with xt:Commerce in its title. In late 2006, the VWA thesis documented approximately 80,000 installed shop systems and an average of 111 new installations per day, explicitly identifying the installed-base figure as the vendor's own figure.
In February 2008, Heise reported that xt:Commerce was running on an estimated 100,000 servers worldwide. In the same year, t3n magazine counted xt:Commerce, together with osCommerce, among the most widely used open-source shop software in the German-speaking market, and a publication by ibi research at the University of Regensburg presented xt:Commerce as one of the leading open-source e-commerce solutions.
In October 2005, the xt:Commerce word/device mark was filed as a Community trade mark and registered in November 2006. On that basis, WIPO recorded International Registration No. 920332 in January 2007, with Guido Winger personally listed as the holder.
National registers confirm this independently: the Canadian register records Guido Winger as applicant and original registered owner with a claimed use since October 2004, Australia published the registration in 2007, and the US register lists him as the registrant of the US mark registered in 2008.
The Canadian register documents the assignment of the mark from Guido Winger to xt:Commerce GmbH in May 2010. The international registration expired in 2017 and is no longer in force.
In June 2007, xt:Commerce GmbH was entered in the Austrian commercial register. A ruling by the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court records that the company emerged from the Winger & Zanier partnership. Guido Winger served as managing director until 2010.
In October 2008, xt:Commerce VEYTON 4 was released as a newly developed generation of the system, followed in 2010 by a dedicated handbook published by Galileo Press.
In June 2010, SafeCharge International acquired xt:Commerce GmbH. The acquisition announcement of 22 June 2010 cited over 100,000 shops and listed reference customers including Osram, Volkswagen Accessories, 3M, Butlers, Mindfactory, Marktkauf, Delsey and Bugatti. Shortly afterwards, the trade press reported that co-founder Guido Winger was stepping down as managing director and leaving the company.
The software had a long afterlife: as late as the end of 2013, Heise reported early rough estimates of around 50,000 shops still running on the third product generation.
The key statements on this page can be verified against the following sources.
Today, Guido Winger is a co-founder of myBytes, working on production AI models for mid-sized companies.