Recently ordered a notebook at dell.com and kept going back to check the order status. They tried to give me plenty of information, but none of that was really useful for me.

At first glance, the order status page looks impressive because it claims to report status at a very fine grained level. For example, you can find out which of the following production stages your order is in:

• Kitting (gathering parts required for the order)
  
• Build
  
• Testing
  
• Boxing (obviously, putting everything in a box!)
  

In my case, the Kitting, Build and Testing phases were completed in less than 1 day after placing the order. But, the order remained in the Boxing phase for 3 days!

Searching Google reveals that this is exactly the case for most other customers.

This makes me conclude, like any average user, that Dell builds fast but is very inefficient in packaging! All because they tried to give out information that is better kept to themselves.

Oh yeah, their Shipping information is no good either. At first, they'll tell you it's been shipped. But, the details will reveal that it is actually travelling from their manufacturing facility to local facility (Why should I care about this?). The shipping method you chose (overnight, 2nd day etc) only applies after it has been shipped again from the local facility.

All they had to tell me was "it's in production" or "it's been shipped, here's the tracking number". That would have conveyed all the information I need as an online customer.