One of few dissatisfactory features when shopping on Amazon.com is what happens in the period after you make your order and before the order ships.
I often find myself buying books that "usually ships in 8-9 days" as it says on the website. Most of the time this involves buying from amazon.co.uk books that were really published in the US market (ie they have a same day delivery status on Amazon.com), so they have to be moved to England first which takes time.
Once you've submitted such an order you rarely get any information on the progress of those 8-9 days until the day the books ship.
There's an "expected shipping date", but right up until the actual shipping date that often seems to just be the current date + the known average delivery time (so for today it's October 27th for books shipping in 8-9 days)
What would be nice is some more structure to this information, so you could tell what kind of progress had been made in the flow that usually takes 8-9 days, and progress for each book in the order preferably.
This is especially interesting, since in my experience the variance on this 8-9 number is quite high - much higher than the variance in delivery time once the book is shipped and the postal service is in charge (even if that takes 3 days).
The variance in itself would be an interesting number to know btw. I wonder if the "8-9" is supposed to account for that or simply to represent an average of 8.5.