From the NAW Blog:

Distributors are well-positioned to work intimately with key customers. They can devote the time and resources to engage proactively with customers to understand needs and goals. They can analyze both transactional and customer-provided data to generate industry-specific insights, develop robust benchmarks (in the form of spending patterns seen across similarly grouped customers) and tailor advice to match customer objectives. The benefits of doing so are immense.

Amazon simply isn’t designed for such a hands-on strategy. They also rely more on transactional data than customer-provided data. And there aren’t any indications that Amazon will shift their approach any time soon. They just aren’t set up to provide that type of intimate, collaborative feedback loop with their customers.

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