As has already been said, manufacturers are not good at all for stocking, shipping, or customer service. Manufacturers build things, and the only reason you can order direct is because someone sold them a retail sales system in the cloud somewhere for you to do business with them, and there are no banks of phones and customer service people waiting to help you with your transaction. This is why Amazon has prospered, they do the things well that manufacturers don't. I work for a manufacturer, and we can't hardly keep the warehouse and assembly workers we have due to local Amazon warehouses hiring them away. And our customer service sucks, because we have 1 CS person covering 10 states. We build some good stuff though, so people keep on buying.