^ no ... in my business it's very important to maintain personal contact (email, telephone, meetings) with the customers. But it's different from CDs.
Imagine you're one of these merchants and you're shipping 2 CDs to 1000 customers each day. Now, if 5% of these shippments are delayed for some reasons and you have to answer the customers' emails, you'll have to write 50 emails each day. Sounds easy ... but you'll see that it takes you about 5 minutes to write one of these emails, because you'll have to check the details, talk to the supplier, see if the money has already been paid etc.. So you'll spend about 250 minutes each day writing emails ... more than 4 hours.
They'd have to hire people solely for writing emails ...