CAM Commerce Solutions, Inc.

17075 Newhope Street
Fountain Valley, CA 92708

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contacts:
Geoffrey D. Knapp, CEO & Founder
CAM Commerce Solutions
888-427-2260

Mathew Hayden, President
Hayden Communications, Inc.
858-704-5065

(FOUNTAIN VALLEY, CA) - May 2, 2001--CAM Commerce Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ:CADA) announced today that Geoff Knapp, CEO and Founder, has provided shareholders with a full update, including information about its core business, recent acquisitions, new products and initiatives, market outlook and competitors, and other relevant topics.

Why are you optimistic?

When we looked back after our disappointing results last year, we realized that the market conditions were only partially to blame for our revenue declines and resulting losses. The part of the company that had become broken was sales and marketing, which had always been the company’s strength in the past. As a result, we reworked the way we generate sales leads and follow through on them in the sales cycle. Primarily, we created an inside sales group to follow up on all "in-bound" leads and to prospect into our historical lead database of nearly 50,000 leads, most of which were not being followed up on effectively. We decided to take our senior sales reps out of the loop on following up on new leads and old leads that were not active in favor of trying to just give them "warm" opportunities that were pre-qualified. We started to build the inside sales group last October and brought it on-line on February 1st. The results have far exceeded our expectations as we are currently setting up on average 30 appointments a day for the sales force. We see no reason this will not continue. These are retailers who have been pre-qualified and asked to meet with a senior sales person. When you project this over a full year, the activity level is far beyond anything we have ever seen. Our current dilemma is that our sales cycle is 6 months to a year on average and we need time to see the "activity" turn to shipped orders.

We created a new VP of marketing position and filled it with a very creative and driven individual. In a very short time frame, we have dramatically improved our marketing efforts and put lots of new measurements in place. Our lead generation has increased significantly and our cost per lead has decreased. However, we have expanded our marketing efforts as a result of the success we have seen which has resulted in higher costs overall, although nothing significant. Once again, we need time to see sales "leads" turn into sales "orders".

We expect that by the September quarter we will be seeing material increase’s in new system sales as a result of the above-mentioned efforts. Our products are as strong or stronger than they have ever been in relation to our competition. Overall our service is now the best in the industry and the best it has ever been in the company’s history. If we do not see the sales increase’s later this year, we will be very surprised and we will have to "adapt, improvise and overcome" at that time!

When do you plan to be profitable?

Of course this is totally dependent on the sales increases. We expect to have a positive EBIDA in Q4 and be profitable in Q1 (December quarter) of next year. Since we do not carry much of a backlog, this requires more guesswork than with many other types of businesses. Once again, we base our optimism on the important sales oriented leading indicators mentioned above.

What is your cash "burn rate"?

People always refer to cash "burn" as if a company’s management is throwing money into the flames. The better question is how long will the "investment" in our business continue to be greater than the expenditure? Or when will we see a return on investment? Our management team is very conservative when it comes to cash. We have no intention of blowing through our cash before making the necessary adjustments in fixed overhead. In fact, we made meaningful adjustments in our fixed overhead over the past few days that should allow us to be more profitable as sales increase. With the very recent changes we made in our operating overhead taking full effect in the next month or two, without improvement in sales we would be going through less than $1m a year in cash per year as the result of operations. Within six months we will begin to trim fixed overhead further if we do not see the sales increases. We currently have a very strong balance sheet and approximately $9 million in cash, or just short of $3 per share.

What is happening with i.STAR?

i.STAR, which is our seamless Internet Storefront product was a product that we had very high hopes for 18 months ago based on market conditions and what we, along with many other companies, perceived as a surging demand for affordable and integrated e-commerce for the smaller business. We still have high hopes, but our outlook on how we will succeed and when has changed. Our idea from the beginning was that what the small retailer really needed was a way to leverage the Internet to expand their market locally and to gain a competitive advantage locally, while at the same time opening the door to a full e-commerce opportunity. We believe that is just as true today. It was with this idea that we launched the i.STAR project 2 years ago. As we completed version 1 of the product, the dot "coms" were already becoming dot "bombs". The smaller retailer who at one point was told they had to get to the web to survive, was now feeling smug that they never made the move. The sense of urgency to get "on-line" had died. At the same time we were finding that our first offering of i.STAR was too generic and not flexible enough to meet the diverse needs of our customer base. Furthermore, we were finding the education process a long one and that the small retailer lacked the management and personnel resources to launch an effective e-commerce initiative. For example, a store that wanted all its inventory on-line might have to capture and store 10,000 product images and deal with the constantly changing inventory in regards to keeping up new images. More detailed product descriptions needed to be created for each of the 10,000 items and entered into the system. Someone had to now answer customer e-mails and deal with shipping orders and handling returns that went through UPS. Who at a small store was going to do this?

In general, the small retailer has always been a late adopter of technology. The education process is long. When we started in business in 1983 almost no small retailers even had a computer. Now 70% are automated. Selling systems in the early years was very difficult. Retailers did not understand how they worked and they did not understand the payback. All they saw was the expense. This is exactly the point at which we are at with the Internet, but that will change. It will take a few years, but it will change and the wave will eventually rise and we will be there when it happens to take advantage of it. The way this will happen is by planting seeds in each geographic market and each type of retail specialty. For example, a sporting goods store in Las Vegas implements i.STAR and over time begins to become successful. They are offering their customers a 24 x 7 shopping experience and allowing the local customer base to look-up items and prices before coming down to the store. Kids who cannot drive themselves to the store are on-line. Pretty soon the other competitors in town hear about the great e-commerce site their competitor has and they begin to feel as if they are losing customers and business as a result of not having a competitive offering. This is what will drive them to products like i.STAR. Not the ROI, but the fear of falling behind and losing customers. That fear was originally there during the Internet boom a couple of years ago, but died. Our product and our approach are as unique today as they were when we started. Furthermore, we are willing to stay on course and be patient, while many of other companies have given up due to lack of demand and the inability to make money on this type of product. We believe we will be cash break even on the i.STAR project within 12 months. In the mean time, our investment to continue is no more than $150k a year at this point even if we did not sign up another customer. Furthermore, the i.STAR product helps us attract new customers for our complete system offering which does not show up on the i.STAR Profit and Loss statement.

What about the new accounting software that was soon to be released last quarter?

The final modules, which are Accounts Payable, General Ledger and Bank Reconciliation, are scheduled for first shipments in late May. These are in addition to Accounts Receivable and Sales Order Processing, which were released last year. As with most major software projects, this has taken longer than we expected, but the product is also more than we originally intended to offer. The program is in the final stages of testing. Once released, CAM will be the "ONLY" company offering our target market a true, fully integrated accounting package as part of a "one source" solution. Strong accounting controls are at the core of most successful businesses and the lack of powerful and integrated accounting solutions in our industry has long been a problem. Nobody had one, so nobody else was at a disadvantage. That will change with the release of Retail STAR® version 5.1, which features a full accounting suite. This should help us win new business and will be a new revenue source for us as well.

What is happening with the eBay deal?

We struck a deal with eBay in December to develop for our customers, software that would provide a fully integrated solution with eBay’s on-line trading community to allow our customers to place, track, report on and fulfill auctions on eBay. Included in the deal is a revenue share opportunity and joint marketing opportunities. Due to events at eBay we slowed our development efforts in March. The decision to start up again has been focused on the return on investment being 12 to 24 months out. Thus, it is a project we are looking carefully at, prior to seeing the sales increases we are expecting. Without the sales increase the eBay project is probably not one we will continue to fund. We are still very bullish on the opportunity and we are prepared to continue the development of the project as soon as we believe the order flow has picked up and will stay up. That could be in the very short term. For right now, we are on hold with the development effort. This is the kind of deal that we would not have thought twice about continuing to fund when investors were willing to accept investment in the future, with profitability to follow. We think it is something we should be doing, but we are determined to get to profitability short term even if it means forgoing some potentially key projects like this.

What do you think X-Charge can grow into?

X-Charge is the actual software that facilitates the integration between Global Payments (formerly NDC) and our software. It also provides the user interface for processing and reconciling credit card transactions. While we sell the software, the real money is earned from the credit card processing service we provide as an independent sales organization for Global Payments. Following the lengthy development cycle with the software, we promoted one of our more technical senior sales reps to head the X-Charge project. We began setting up the first pilot sites in November and really began to push the program in January. Since that time we have signed up a meaningful number of customers, which represents approximately $300,000 in annual credit card processing fees to us. At our current rate of adoption we will generate approximately $35k to $50k per month in annual, recurring billings, or $400k to $600k per year. While not huge revenue numbers, this is highly profitable recurring revenue. Of course, it is our goal to increase the adoption rate. However, we are still in the early stages of the roll out and want to make sure that everything is functioning properly and that we have the proper systems in place going forward. It is important to note that there is a lag time between "sign up", when the customer is actually "processing" through us and when we receive the actual royalty income. From sign up to the time we actually get paid by Global on an account is averaging about 120 days.

What is happening with the MicroBiz acquisition?

The MicroBiz acquisition did not initially work out in the ways in which we expected it to. The company’s numbers turned south on us immediately following the acquisition as a direct result of market conditions. It was just bad timing. We do not believe any of it had to do with management issues at MicroBiz or how the company was managed following the acquisition. A significant portion of our losses over the last three quarters were attributable to the MicroBiz acquisition. Furthermore, we did misjudge our ability to gain marketing synergies between the two companies, while running MicroBiz as a fully independent company. As a result, we have very recently made major changes at MicroBiz. The most fundamental change is that we eliminated MicroBiz as a separate operating company and have incorporated the product and operations into CAM. Thus, MicroBiz is now a "product line" rather than an independent office, and the Mahwah, NJ office is now a CAM office for east coast operations that will feature sales and service of all our products, not just MicroBiz. These changes have already been made. As part of this change we also dramatically lowered our fixed overhead, such that we are optimistic that the MicroBiz product line can operate profitably on a go forward basis. We will analyze the effectiveness of our changes on a going basis and make any further adjustments as needed.

What is happening with the Genesis acquisition?

The Genesis acquisition was very small, but it is also very profitable for us. We did not actually acquire the company. We purchased the assets, which included the products and customer service relationships and we hired most of the remaining Genesis employees. In the final analysis there were about 20% less real customers than we thought there were and slightly lower revenues, but the expense structure has also been better than we originally anticipated. The final analysis is that we are very happy with this purchase, and it is a highly profitable small division.

How is the Retail ICE (free software) initiative working?

The original idea here was to seed the market for our products by offering a single user, single store version of our software for free. We determined we received very little revenue and no profit from this size customer in the past, so we felt we were risking very little with this strategy. We hoped to get customers using our products and then to upgrade as they grew. The results have been less significant than we hoped for but positive overall. We are coming up on two years since we launched this program and we will have delivered over 4,000 copies of the software by that time. Without spending money on advertising, we have been unable to increase the adoption rate and surprisingly it has been very steady throughout the entire time we have offered it. I would have expected it to increase, or possibly decline but it has remained constant. We have received a small, but steady number of upgrades. The real effect is probably yet to be felt as the customers who use the ICE software grow. One problem has been that a large percentage of customers just can not implement a system properly without some help. This help is something we provide with our regular systems. We have created a training video we now have available to assist the retailer with this process and we are doing better follow up with new ICE users to offer them different training options. These training options are fee based. The feedback about the software from those that do implement it is overwhelmingly positive. While not a homerun for us, the Retail ICE initiative is slowly working and we plan to continue it for the foreseeable future as we look for new ways to increase the adoption rate and the rate at which retailers who order the software become productive users of the product. The product is certainly helping us with increasing our mindshare and market share.

How are your products doing in the market against the competition?

Our industry is one of the most competitive and fragmented. There have always been a core group of overly aggressive and sometimes unethical competitors in this business. Over the past couple years we feel that we have further distanced ourselves from much of the competition with our new products. Our primary competitors are still struggling to get to general release on a real Windows product. While dealing with the expected issues in launching new products, our next generation offerings have begun to reach a level of maturity that our competitors can’t match today with a modern product. At the same time the scope of our product offerings has greatly expanded. Once again our competition has had difficulty keeping up. Several have closed their doors over the past few years due to market conditions and their inability to make the jump to next generation products. We believe our competitive advantages today and our ability to differentiate ourselves in the market place have never been better. Furthermore, we have not seen a significant new competitor enter the market in many years.

How is new technology changing your market and/or your plans?

As mentioned earlier, our customers are not early adopters of technology. They attend to adopt what the big guys have proven works and when the technology becomes affordable. The biggest potential change on the horizon is the Application Service Provider or ASP model. So far all that have tried have failed in our market, but we believe the concept will eventually catch on for certain segments of the market. Part of our development effort is focused on making sure we have a product for this market over the next 1 to 2 years. The eventual broad adoption of integrated e-commerce offerings as alluded to above, is the other significant change we see in technology effecting our market.

Are the positive changes in the overall quality of service reported previously holding up?

The "real time" response model we achieved throughout our service departments last year has held up and we, along with our customers continue to realize the many benefits of superior service. For most of our history, we like our competitors, worked on a "call back" model. Customers would call in and then in the majority of cases wait for a call back from a technician. This model was never good enough for most of our customers. Even when we called back immediately, we often were unable to reach the customer because they had left for lunch, were on the phone, etc. We wasted time playing phone tag and the customer’s perception was nearly always that call backs took even longer than actual statistics showed they did. We do not believe there is any significant competitor in the industry that can match the level of service we are currently providing our customers on a global basis. The impact throughout our organization of having happier customers and fewer response time related service issues to deal with, has been a watershed event in the company’s history.

What is the growth rate of your target market?

The small retailer has long been under pressure from the "category killers" and the Wal Mart type large box retailers. There has also been significant consolidation in many retail segments. The bad news is that the number of core retail customers in our target market may actually be shrinking. The good news is that our ability to significantly grow our market share through our new sales and marketing efforts should more than offset this along with offering new products and services to the existing customer base. As an example, if there were 5,000 new systems sold into our target market last year and we were involved in 1,000 of those decisions, but there will be 4,500 this year and we are involved in 2,250 of them, then we still have significant growth opportunities. These numbers are just for the purposes of illustrating the example and are not meant to represent actual numbers. Nobody in our market has significant market share today. We feel that our market share in our target markets as a group is about 6%. That leaves us significant upside possibilities.

Are there are any plans to acquire additional companies?

Unless we see something that is just too good to pass up, meaning highly profitable for a good price and very strategic, we do not plan to look at anything until the company is profitable again and with the expectation that this will continue for the foreseeable future. Our goal in any acquisition would be customers and predictable recurring revenue streams, along with highly predictable profitability.

Will you buy back stock and if so at what price?

As a management team, we are generally not supporters of stock buyback programs. We have had numerous conversations with investors who have made their case to us as to why we should buy back stock. It is our feeling that unless the stock is selling below cash value, that management’s decision to buy back stock is a sign that either the company has no better expected use for their cash to grow the business and/or they are trying to prop up the stock price. The short-term effect is great for the investor who would love to see the stock pop up so they can get out. The effects of a stock buyback on the stock price are proven to be short-lived and do not benefit the investor or company long-term. Having said that, the company will consider a stock repurchase if the share price makes such an investment too compelling to ignore from a pure financial perspective.

What are you doing about Investor Relations?

We continue to employ Hayden Communications to represent us in this area. We are very satisfied with the job they are doing for us. We recognize that our recent performance has tied their hands somewhat, and we have asked them to limit certain opportunities for us until we have more visibility on when things will turn. It is our hope and expectation this will happen this summer. Creating shareholder value and liquidity in the stock is very important to us and is one of our primary goals. We will continue to try and communicate our plans and strategies to investors as evidenced by this document and we will continue to provide the kind of information and communication we would like to receive as shareholders in another company.

About CAM Commerce Solutions

CAM Commerce Solutions Inc. provides total commerce solutions for traditional and Web retailers that are based on the company's open architecture software products for managing inventory, point of sale, sales transaction processing and accounting. These solutions often include hardware, installation, training, service and consulting provided by the company. CAM has more than 10,000 retail customers with many more store locations utilizing its systems to manage their business. You can visit CAM Commerce Solutions at www.camcommerce.com.

Important Information

The statements made in this news release, including those relating to the expectations of profitability and economic climates, are forward-looking and are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as ``will,'' ``should,'' ``believe,'' ``expect,'' ``anticipate,'' ``outlook,'' ``forecast'' and other similar expressions that predict or indicate future events or trends, or that are not statements of historical matters, identify forward-looking statements. Expectations concerning financial results for future quarters are not actual results and are based upon preliminary estimates, as well as certain assumptions management believes to be reasonable at this time. Investors should not rely upon forward-looking statements because they are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the company's expectations and the company expressly does not undertake any duty to update forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this news release. In addition to the factors set forth elsewhere in this release, the economic, competitive, technological and other factors identified in CAM Commerce Solutions' filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission could affect the forward-looking statements contained in this news release.

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