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E-Commerce Platforms & Shop Systems

Gambio

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Panel rating · 6 judges · How to read the stars

Category median

Sovereignty: not determined

0–5 in half steps. 5 means the rubric's top anchor is met on the evidence.

by Gambio GmbH · www.gambio.de

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Read this page as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.

The panel's verdict

Gambio is a cloud-hosted shop system from Gambio GmbH, Bremen, aimed at small German merchants. Its bench strength is merchandising plus legal care: catalogue & checkout lands at 4 on confirmed variants, tiered pricing, vouchers and B2B, while tax & German legal correctness reaches 4-6 on legal texts with Haftungsübernahme optional in all cloud plans — even the higher scores note that VAT determination, OSS and reverse charge appear nowhere in the evidence. Pricing transparency spans 4-6: four public tiers from Starter 29 €/month to Enterprise 219 €/month with a 12-month minimum term, 11% annual discount and worked example 12 x 29 € = 348 €, but transaction fees and volume limits are unstated. Weakest are data ownership & exit, flat at 3 (unspecified import/export, cloud-only, no documented migration or deletion), and operations at 3-4, with stock, returns and carrier labels absent and order management resting on a third-party Afterbuy credit. The 4-6 spreads on tax & German legal correctness and pricing transparency came from judges weighting vendor-maintained legal texts and public list prices differently against silent tax and transaction costs; flagged splits flagged none above threshold.

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Speaks for it

  • Variant products, tiered pricing (Staffelpreise), vouchers, B2B and unlimited products confirmed on the all-inclusive feature list
  • Legal texts with Haftungsübernahme optional in all cloud plans, alongside 'Zertifizierte Rechtssicherheit'
  • Four tiers publicly priced (29-219 €/month, 12-month minimum term) with an 11% annual discount, worked example 12 x 29 € = 348 €, hosting included and a 30-day trial
  • German vendor — Gambio GmbH, Bremen — as contracting entity, with hosting bundled rather than a separate extra
  • An ecosystem of over 200 interfaces and partner firms plus a Gambio Store

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Held against it

  • Payments evidenced only as 'PayPal & Co.' — no invoice, direct debit, guest checkout or bundles on record
  • Tax mechanics silent: no VAT determination, OSS, reverse charge, VAT-ID validation or e-invoicing anywhere in the evidence
  • Data exit undocumented: unspecified import/export, cloud-only hosting, no self-hosting, deletion or migration path on record
  • Back office thin: no stock, returns, partial shipments or carrier labels evidenced, with order management resting on a 6-month credit for a 59 €/month third-party Afterbuy tier
  • Developer surface closed: API access appears only as a plan-matrix row, with no webhooks, headless storefront or staging on record

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Best for

  • You are a small German merchant who wants vendor-maintained legal texts with Haftungsübernahme plus a quick cloud launch (30-day trial, 30-minute setup claim, hosting and updates included)
  • You want a publicly computable licence price — four tiers from 29 €/month with a worked annual example of 12 x 29 € = 348 €
  • You prefer a German vendor, Gambio GmbH of Bremen, as your contracting entity

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Avoid if

  • You need documented tax mechanics — destination VAT, OSS, reverse charge, VAT-ID validation or e-invoicing — the evidence evidences none
  • You need a guaranteed exit — export fidelity, documented deletion, a migration path or self-hosting — data ownership & exit scores flat at 3
  • You run fulfilment-heavy operations needing in-platform stock, returns, partial shipments or carrier label printing — operations scores 3-4
  • You are a development team wanting documented APIs, webhooks or a headless storefront — API access is one cell in the plan matrix

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The scores

Catalogue & checkout

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How this is scored

Products, variants, pricing rules and the path to payment — the part that either converts or does not.

0 — Flat product list with one price and no variants; checkout is a form and one payment method.

3 — Variants and categories with a standard checkout and two or three payment methods, but no bundles, no tiered pricing and no guest checkout worth the name.

5 — Full variant matrix, product bundles, tiered and customer-group pricing, guest checkout, and the payment methods a German shop needs including invoice and direct debit.

8 — Configurable products, per-channel pricing, promotions and vouchers with rules, a checkout that can be customised without a rebuild, and payment via the major providers plus buy-now-pay-later where offered.

10 — Merchandising and checkout are the product: rule-driven pricing and promotions, A/B-testable checkout, multi-currency and multi-language as standard, and conversion features (abandoned cart, one-page checkout) shipped rather than bolted on.

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The Merchant

Variants, tiered pricing, vouchers and B2B are confirmed, which is solid conversion groundwork — but the payment story is just "PayPal & Co.", with no invoice or direct debit evidenced, and no bundles, guest checkout or rule-driven promotions in the evidence. Checkout changeability beyond the StyleEdit design tool is unevidenced, so I sit between the anchors. 1

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The B2B Seller

Variantenartikel, Staffelpreise, unlimited products and vouchers are all evidenced, which is more than a flat list — but the payment story is 'PayPal & Co.', with no invoice, no direct debit and no buy-now-pay-later named, and for me that vagueness loses trade deals. No bundles, no guest checkout and no per-channel pricing in evidence; 'B2B' is a bare checklist word with no customer-specific price list behind it. 1

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The Developer

Variants, tiered pricing (Staffelpreise), vouchers and B2B are on the all-inclusive list, which clears rubric level 3 — but bundles, guest checkout, invoice and direct debit appear nowhere, and 'Zahlungsabwicklung mit PayPal & Co.' is the entire payment story. Nothing on promotion rules, per-channel pricing or conversion features like abandoned cart or one-page checkout. 1

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The Operations Lead

Variants, tiered pricing, vouchers, B2B and multilingual are confirmed feature items, which is beyond a bare variant list. But the evidence evidences no bundles, no guest checkout, and payments only as 'PayPal & Co.' — the German payment set (invoice, direct debit) is not shown, so I stop between the 3 and 5 anchors. 1

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The Data Protection Officer

Variants, tiered pricing, vouchers, B2B and unlimited categories are all listed in the features, but checkout specifics stop at 'Zahlungsabwicklung mit PayPal & Co.' — no invoice, no direct debit, no guest checkout, no bundles evidenced. That sits between the 3 and 5 anchors: more than a flat list, less than the payment spread a German shop needs. 1

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The Skeptic

Variants, tiered pricing, vouchers and B2B are all confirmed on the feature list, so the merchandising side is real. But the checkout evidence is one phrase — 'Zahlungsabwicklung mit PayPal & Co.' — with no invoice, no direct debit, no guest checkout and no bundles anywhere in the record, so I cannot credit the German checkout anchor. 1

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Extensibility & developer surface

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How this is scored

Themes, apps, APIs and headless — whether the shop can be shaped to the business, and at what cost in lock-in.

0 — Fixed templates, no app ecosystem, no API.

3 — Theme editing within limits and a small app store; a read-mostly API and no local development story.

5 — Custom themes with a template language, an app or plugin ecosystem, a documented REST API, and webhooks for the core order events.

8 — Full storefront API for headless builds, an extension framework with its own lifecycle, staging environments, version control for themes, and documented rate limits.

10 — A platform a team can own: headless-first APIs, open-source or source-available core, plugin architecture with a real dependency model, local development and CI supported, and upgrade paths that do not orphan customisations.

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The Merchant

There is a Gambio Store, 200+ partner interfaces, StyleEdit for design, and API access — though API-Zugang sits as a row in the plan matrix, which smells of tier gating. No webhooks, no headless storefront, no local development story anywhere in the evidence, so a developer cannot own this platform. 1

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The B2B Seller

A Gambio Store, the StyleEdit design tool and 'über 200 Schnittstellen und Partnerfirmen' make a real ecosystem, but 'API-Zugang' appears only as a plan-matrix checkbox with no documented surface, and there is no word of webhooks, headless, staging or a local development story. The pitch 'Keine Programmierkenntnisse nötig' tells you who this platform is for, and it is not a dev team. 1

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The Developer

StyleEdit is a closed design tool, the pitch is 'no programming knowledge required', the shop lives only in Gambio's cloud, and 'API-Zugang' is one cell in a plan matrix with no documentation behind it — no local development, no version control for themes, no plugin dependency model. The 200 interfaces and Gambio Store keep this a hair above rubric level 3; I read a closed template editor as exactly the future migration I fear. 1

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The Operations Lead

There is an app store, 200 interfaces, a StyleEdit design tool and an API-Zugang — but API access is a plan dimension, suggesting tier gating, and no webhooks, headless API, staging or version control are evidenced. 'Keine Programmierkenntnisse nötig' is a marketing line, not a developer surface. 1

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The Data Protection Officer

API access appears as a plan feature and there are 200+ interfaces and partners, but 'Keine Programmierkenntnisse nötig' and the StyleEdit tool suggest bounded theming rather than a developer surface. No evidence of webhooks, headless storefront, staging, or a real plugin lifecycle, so I can't go past the middle. 1

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The Skeptic

'API-Zugang' appears as a row in the plan matrix, meaning API access is a tier differentiator rather than a right, and the developer story stops at StyleEdit, free themes and 'Keine Programmierkenntnisse nötig'. Two hundred interfaces and partner firms is an ecosystem claim; webhooks, a headless storefront API, local development and staging are absent from the record. 1

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Order operations & back office

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How this is scored

What happens after checkout: order management, stock, returns, shipping, and the link to ERP or accounting.

0 — An order list and an email; stock is a number nobody trusts, returns are manual.

3 — Order statuses and basic stock, one shipping integration, and returns handled by hand.

5 — Order workflow with partial shipments, multi-warehouse stock, named carrier integrations with label printing, and a returns process in the system.

8 — Multi-channel order intake, automated fulfilment routing, supplier and dropshipping flows, and maintained interfaces to named ERP and accounting systems.

10 — The shop is the front of an operation: real-time stock across channels and warehouses, returns and refunds fully worked including partials, ERP integration the vendor maintains, and operational reporting a merchant runs the business from.

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The Merchant

Multichannel, invoices and delivery notes, and an Afterbuy partnership are on the page, but nothing on stock, returns, partial shipments or carrier integrations. When the promoted answer to order management is a €59/month external tool (Afterbuy), the built-in back office is telling you it's thin. 1

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The B2B Seller

Invoices & delivery notes, multichannel selling and import/export cover the order basics, and Afterbuy arrives as six months of Growth-tier credit — an order-management partner at arm's length. Beyond that, stock, returns, partial shipments, carrier label printing and maintained ERP interfaces are entirely unevidenced, which is thin for running a business after checkout. 1

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The Developer

Invoices and delivery notes ship with the product, multichannel selling is claimed, and there are partner credits for Afterbuy (fulfilment/after-sales tooling) and Baygraph (analytics), which hints at a real back office. Returns, stock accuracy, carrier labels and any vendor-maintained ERP interface are entirely unevidenced. 1

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The Operations Lead

Multichannel selling and invoices & delivery notes exist, and the Afterbuy credit points at ERP connectivity — but it's a six-month discount on a third party, not an interface the vendor maintains. Partial shipments, carrier label printing, returns and partial refunds are entirely unevidenced, and that silence is decisive for me. 1

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The Data Protection Officer

Invoices and delivery notes, import/export and multichannel selling are listed, but the evidence is mute on stock, returns, shipping or any named ERP link — the Afterbuy offer is a separate product with six months of credit, not an evidenced order workflow. Order states and stock are the level I can confirm, no more. 1

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The Skeptic

Multichannel selling and invoices & delivery notes are confirmed, and 200 interfaces gestures at carriers and ERP. But the only named back-office tool is Afterbuy — offered as a promotional credit worth 6 months of a €59/month tier — while stock, returns, shipping labels and fulfilment routing are entirely absent from the record. 1

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Data ownership & exit

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How this is scored

Whether the catalogue, customers and order history remain the merchant's: export completeness, hosting choice, and what leaving actually costs.

0 — Export is a partial CSV; order history and customer records cannot leave intact, and hosting is the vendor's alone.

3 — CSV export of products and customers, order history partial, no self-hosting, no documented migration path.

5 — Complete export of catalogue, customers and orders via API or dump, documented deletion, and a stated data-return commitment.

8 — Full-fidelity export including media and order documents, self-hosting or a choice of hosting partner, and no metering that prices a migration out of reach.

10 — Ownership is structural rather than promised: open-source or source-available platform the merchant can run anywhere, database-level access, documented migration in both directions, and contractual data return.

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The Merchant

An unspecified "Import / Export" and cloud-only hosting ("Erstelle deinen Shop in der Cloud") is everything the evidence offers: no export completeness, no self-hosting, no deletion or migration path documented. Whether my customers and order history leave intact is a promise, not evidence. 1

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The B2B Seller

The shop lives in Gambio's cloud with hosting included, and the only exit evidence is an unspecified 'Import/Export' feature — no export fidelity, no documented deletion, no data-return commitment, no self-hosting option and no migration path. Leaving this platform is a promise the evidence does not make. 1

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The Developer

'Import / Export' is a single feature bullet with no scope, the shop is created in Gambio's cloud with no self-hosting option, and the evidence says nothing about export completeness, documented deletion or any migration path out. That is rubric level 3 exactly: export of unknown fidelity, no self-hosting, no documented exit. 1

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The Operations Lead

Import/export appears as a bare feature bullet with no format or completeness detail, and the shop is created in the cloud with hosting included — no self-hosting, no documented deletion or migration path. That is exactly the 3-anchor situation. 1

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The Data Protection Officer

Import/export is on the feature list with no stated scope, the pitch is cloud-only ('Erstelle deinen Shop in der Cloud'), and there is not a word on deletion, export fidelity or a migration path. As the person who has to prove deletion executed against order history, a one-line feature mention is worth roughly the 3 anchor and nothing above it. 1

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The Skeptic

The shop lives in the vendor's cloud ('Erstelle deinen Shop in der Cloud', 'Hosting inklusive') with no self-hosting option on record. 'Import / Export' is a checkbox with no stated scope over order history or documents, and there is no migration path, deletion policy or data-return commitment — leaving costs whatever the export button happens to give you. 1

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European sovereignty panel opinion

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How this is scored

Where customer and order data live, who the contracting entity is, and which subprocessors sit in the checkout path. Independently sourced by the sovereignty pipeline.

0 — Non-EU vendor and contracting entity, hosting unstated or non-EU, subprocessors unnamed.

3 — EU hosting offered as an option while the contracting entity is non-EU, or the subprocessor list is absent.

5 — EU hosting as standard and an EU contracting entity, but parts of the chain — CDN, analytics, payment routing, support tooling — are non-EU without an explained safeguard.

8 — EU hosting on named infrastructure, EU contracting entity, complete subprocessor list published, any non-EU processing named with its legal basis.

10 — Sovereign end to end and evidenced: vendor, entity, hosting and every subprocessor European, certification published, and a self-hosted option that puts the shop entirely under the merchant's control.

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The Merchant

The vendor is German (Bremen), which helps, but the pipeline recorded no sovereignty attributes at all: hosting is stated only as "the cloud" with no location, and no subprocessor list exists. Silence on where checkout data sits and who processes payments is exactly what rubric level 3 penalises. 1 1

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The B2B Seller

Vendor and contracting entity are German — Gambio GmbH, Bremen — which is the right starting point for a German merchant, and hosting is bundled with the vendor rather than third-party cloud. But the pipeline has no sovereignty attributes on record: hosting location is unstated and no subprocessor list exists, and a German checkout deserves a named chain before I trust it with customer data. 1 1

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The Developer

The vendor is a German GmbH in Bremen and hosting is bundled rather than optional, but the sovereignty pipeline has no attributes on record: hosting location, subprocessor list and certification are all unstated, and payment routing is just 'PayPal & Co.' with the chain unnamed. EU contracting entity yes; evidenced chain no. 1

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The Operations Lead

The sovereignty pipeline has nothing on record: no subprocessor list, and hosting location is unstated beyond 'cloud' with hosting included. Only the provenance (Gambio GmbH, Bremen) confirms an EU entity, which holds it at the low-mid anchor rather than the floor. 1

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The Data Protection Officer

Gambio GmbH of Bremen is an EU contracting entity, but the sovereignty pipeline recorded nothing: hosting location unstated, no subprocessor list published, and the only named processor in the checkout path is PayPal. A German vendor with an unnamed chain lands between the 3 anchor's absent list and the 5 anchor's unexplained non-EU parts. 1

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The Skeptic

Gambio GmbH in Bremen gives a European vendor and contracting entity, which is the only thing carrying this score. Beyond that the chain is unverifiable: hosting is 'the cloud' with no location stated, no subprocessor list exists, 'Zertifizierte Rechtssicherheit' certifies law rather than data residency, and the sovereignty pipeline itself has nothing on record. 1

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Pricing transparency

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How this is scored

Whether a merchant can compute the real annual cost — licence, transaction fees, apps, hosting — from public pages alone. The category where the headline price is least often the invoice.

0 — No public prices at all; every tier is a sales conversation.

3 — A monthly headline exists, but transaction fees, mandatory apps or hosting costs are unstated — the invoice is unknowable from the page.

5 — Tier prices public with billing period stated and transaction fees given, but at least one commonly needed piece (a required app, hosting, payment gateway rate) is unpriced.

8 — Every tier priced publicly including transaction or revenue-share rates, order or GMV limits, and the cost of the extensions most shops need; VAT treatment and minimum term stated.

10 — Complete price computability: annual cost derivable for a given order volume and GMV including licence, transaction fees, hosting and typical extensions — and for open-source platforms, an honest statement that the licence is free and where the money actually goes.

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The Merchant

Four public tiers with minimum term, an 11% annual discount, a worked example (12 × 29 € = 348 €), and hosting included — that's more computable than most. But transaction fees, the order limits hiding behind "low/high volume" tier labels, app-store costs and VAT treatment are all unstated, so my real annual invoice still isn't derivable from the page. 1

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The B2B Seller

This is a strong pricing page: all four tiers public with 12-month terms, monthly/annual options, an 11% annual discount, a worked example (12 × 29 € = 348 €) and hosting included — the licence invoice is computable. But payment-processing rates, the volume limits implied by 'geringem Volumen', and the VAT treatment of the stated prices are all absent, so the real annual cost for a given order volume still cannot be derived. 1

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The Developer

All four tiers are public with the 12-month minimum term stated, hosting is included rather than a hidden extra, and there is even a worked annual example (12 x 29 EUR = 348 EUR) plus a 30-day trial — better than most SaaS pages. But transaction fees, the volume limits the tier names imply ('geringes Volumen' to 'hohem Volumen'), VAT treatment and extension prices beyond the partner credits are unstated, so the real annual invoice is only partly computable. 1

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The Operations Lead

All four tiers are publicly priced with the 12-month minimum term, monthly/annual options at 11% discount, hosting included and a 30-day trial — that removes the usual hosting surprise. But transaction or payment fees, order-volume limits and VAT treatment are absent, so the annual invoice is still only partly computable. 1

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The Data Protection Officer

All four tiers are public with monthly price, 12-month term, an 11% annual discount, a worked 348€ example, and hosting declared included — that's honest. But transaction fees, volume limits behind the 'higher volume' tier names, and VAT treatment are all absent, so the real invoice for a shop of any size is not computable from the page. 1

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The Skeptic

Four tiers priced publicly, 12-month minimum term stated, monthly vs annual at -11% with a worked example, and hosting declared included — more public than most. But the transaction side is the classic hole: payment processing appears as 'PayPal & Co.' with no rates, no VAT treatment of list prices, tier limits only as adjectives ('geringem Volumen'), and no per-tier feature allocation, so the annual invoice for a growing shop is still not computable. 1

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European sovereignty — proven facts

0 of 4 dimensions proven

Built only from facts shown on the vendor's own pages. A dimension we could not prove is left open, not scored as zero.

Ownership Not determined — uncited Report an error
Data residency Not determined ⚠ unverified — uncited Report an error
Subprocessors Not determined ⚠ unverified — uncited Report an error

Where this could be wrong

What we left out

A claim that does not survive our checks costs us the claim, not the page. This is what was taken off this one.

Sources (5)

The pages every claim on this page was read from — each one checked, dated, and kept verifiable.

  1. 1 Vendor homepage www.gambio.de Checked 5 Oct 2026 +2 earlier captures: 16 Sep 2026, 15 Sep 2026 Details →
  2. 2 Security / trust page www.gambio.de Checked 5 Oct 2026 Details →
  3. 3 Catalogue & checkout — found from sitemap www.gambio.de Checked 5 Oct 2026 Details →
  4. 4 Tax & German legal correctness — found from sitemap www.gambio.de Checked 5 Oct 2026 Details →
  5. 5 Extensibility & developer surface — found from sitemap www.gambio.de Checked 5 Oct 2026 Details →