Hostway Releases Merchant Manager 4.0 Shopping Cart Solution; Small Business Ecommerce Solution Now Supports Recurring Billing, Downloadable Product Sales, and Integrates with QuickBooks(R)

March 27, 2006; 11:39 AM
Hostway Corporation, a leading provider of Web hosting and managed services, today announced the release of Merchant Manager 4.0, offering its Ecommerce customers an enhanced shopping cart functionality to support merchants who are selling non-tangible goods such as software and services.

Merchant Manager was already a comprehensive Ecommerce platform for tangible products. With the following enhancements, businesses that sell software and services can now take advantage of the leading Ecommerce platform.

-- Sell downloadable products (MP3s, e-books and software)

-- Easily move and sort products to create category hierarchies with complete drag and drop functionality

-- Sell services within the online store

-- Create recurring billing in order to automatically charge monthly subscriptions

-- Export sales data into QuickBooks(R)

-- Upload images to display based on the attribute chosen, such as a shirt that changes color based on the color swatch a person clicks on

"Ecommerce continues to serve as an expansion outlet for brick and mortar, as well as Web-based businesses. Hostway's goal is providing our customers with the tools to grow their businesses online," said John Lee, VP of global marketing and general manager for Hostway. "The ease-of-use of Hostway's Merchant Manager continues to lower the barrier for anyone wanting to sell online."

In addition to the above new features, Merchant Manager also gives storeowners the ability to do the following:

-- Accommodate all of types of online products

-- Input inventory levels by product or attribute level (10 Small, 5 Medium & 3 Large or 18 Shirts)

-- Automatically refill out of stock date inventory to the store

-- Check and reorder at a set level

-- Get message on a mobile device or email with out of stock notifications

-- Export reports of the top products viewed and purchased, along with customer orders dollar totals

-- Create coupons and promotions

To learn more about Hostway's Merchant Manager, please visit http://www.m2central.com/index.html for details.

About Hostway

Hostway Corporation provides Web hosting and managed services to more than 400,000 customers worldwide. Hostway helps individuals, small businesses and large enterprises achieve more value from state-of-the-art Web-based technologies by reducing their complexity and cost. Founded in 1998, Hostway is one of the five largest Web hosting companies in the world with offices in North America (Chicago (HQ), Austin, Tampa and Vancouver), Europe (Belgium, France, Frankfurt, Hannover, London and Netherlands), Asia (Korea) and Australia (Sydney). For more information about Hostway Corporation, please visit www.hostway.com or call 1-866-467-8929.