CORAL SPRINGS, Fla. -- May 5, 2003 -- Host Depot, Inc. today announced general availability of its proprietary shopping cart for shared hosting customers. Merchant Wizard™ is a hosted e-commerce solution for small businesses, providing integrated shopping cart, product management, order management, payment processing, shipping rates, tax calculations, and reporting. All features are configurable through Host Depot's award winning online Control Panel.

Ed Rasher, Vice President and CTO, said, "We've made it very easy for our customers to add e-commerce capabilities to their Web sites. They simply configure the features they want using our Control Panel and click a button to generate the storefront."

Merchant Wizard is available free with any of Host Depot's Advanced Shared Hosting Plans. E-commerce enabled plans include the Silver Plan, which starts at $37.46 per month and supports up to 100 products, the Gold Plan, which starts at $74.96 per month and supports up to 250 products, and the Platinum Plan, which starts at $112.46 per month and supports unlimited products. Host Depot Support Services also offers assistance to customers, including a complete walk-thru of all Merchant Wizard and Control Panel features.

Merchant Wizard features include real-time shipping rates from major carriers (UPS, USPS, DHL), real-time credit card transactions using Verisign or Authorize.net, payment processing through PayPal, shared or dedicated SSL certificate for secure checkout pages, automated order confirmation email, inventory tracking, order and inventory reports, and batch product data imports. Page styles, headers and footers can also be configured to match existing site designs with or without HTML knowledge.

Merchant Wizard was designed from the ground up to allow customers to quickly and easily add product navigation, product search, shopping cart and checkout features to their sites. Plus customers can easily manage their products and orders in a secure environment, all using a standard Web browser and with no programming or scripting knowledge.

About Host Depot
Host Depot, Inc. is a privately held, leading supplier of Web Hosting and Internet Access solutions established in 1997. Host Depot also provides web design and development, e-commerce, and search engine optimization services. Further information about Host Depot may be obtained visiting the company's web site at http://www.hostdepot.com.