Memory manufacturer Kingston Technology believes that resellers using its new web portal will find it easier and quicker to buy direct from the firm.

Kingston has completed the trial phase of the tool, which is aimed at giving distributors the ability to buy as efficiently as its original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners.

Distributor Hammer is the first partner to use the new system. Craig Proc, a buyer at Hammer, said: "Resellers will benefit as the system reduces the time it takes to make and receive orders."

Traditionally OEM customers have used Electronic Data Integration to speed up the buying process, but for smaller partners the high cost made this impossible.

A Kingston spokeswoman said that OEMs account for just over 50 per cent of its sales. "Kingston is now able to interface electronically with customers at any level," she explained.

"For distributors the Kingston Portal is an easy step to integrate their system with ours.

"They get the benefits of online ordering without any investment on their part. They only need web access."

The spokeswoman said that smaller partners traditionally use fax machines to make orders, which is slow and inefficient.

Proc agreed that, with hundreds of resellers ordering Kingston products, using a fax was time consuming.

He added that Hammer has requested that Kingston integrates a database into the system so customer contacts can be automatically stored. "We have requested this to speed things up in the future," he said.

The Kingston spokeswoman maintained that the vendor is always open to improving the system. "We will develop it further to improve things for our distributors and their partners," she concluded.