Simple explanation is that it wouldn’t be economical with the amounts of merch we’re moving. We used to run the store ourselves way back in the day and then we had the stock in Iceland, so we were shipping across the Atlantic both ways.
Then we tried running it from our Atlanta office for a while and both those options ran at a loss.
Our main goal with merch sales isn’t profit because even if EVE is the best game ever…not everyone knows that so it’s a niche operation to run a store with EVE merch 
We think of it as a service but it has to pay for itself and not be a drain on our main operation which is making games.
Since those days we’ve ran with partners. Partners take the load off us, they have all the deals and processes in place to run a store way more effectively than we do. They have multiple customers and that cuts down on the collective overhead, they have great relationships with suppliers so they can get everything faster and cheaper and in more variety than we could.
We have a great partner now that’s very flexible and good to work with, but they’re US based and while that happens to be our biggest merch market, it means shipping across the pond is a pain. We’ll keep trying to figure that out but our conundrum has always been that we fall between the cracks a bit in terms of our market size. Global store providers tend to prefer customers that can bring them greater volumes of sale.
It’s an extra service but one that we’d love to be able to provide equally, globally, and we’ll keep our eyes open for solutions. Hope that explains things a bit.