But for a bunch of engineers, a script outputting an estimated ship date is trivial. Any decent undergrad CS or engineering student could bang it out in 20 minutes.
As someone that does systems development for a living, I tend to strongly disagree with statements like these.
It seems trivial when you have no idea what you're talking about, but then you dive in, and understand what makes the statement obviously false for this or that particular case.
(Just to be clear; I'm making up stuff below to illustrate a point, nothing implied about how anything is actually done)
Take Zebralight as an example, and the SC600-style body. It's entirely possible that their production lines finishes SC600-styles lights one type at a time. Say in batches of 50 lights.
Then say you've gotten 110 orders for SC600Fc, and 40 for SC600Fd. You can satisfy both by making three batches of the Fc, and one of the Fd, so it's all good.
In order to make as many customers happy as soon as possible though, you start by doing two batches of the SC600, then one of the Fd, and finally the last batch of Fc.
But what if it had been different? What if you'd gotten 110 orders for the Fd and 40 for the Fc? (Reversed counts). Then you'd probably make 2 Fd batches first instead, and the wait times would be flipped.
Yeah, you could make the system take order counts into the mix as they come in, but then you're doing an integration with the web shop, and things start to grow.
You could have someone responsible at the factory update the system about readiness of various lights and ship out estimated shipping dates to people that have ordered already, but then you're not only making a system, but also pulled resources for it. And so it goes.
Before you even get to any of this though, you'd have to start by defining what you want, and find someone to do it.
Yeah, these things can definitively be done, and would be nice to have, but "trivial" and "bang it out in 20 minutes" is usually missing the mark by a wide margin.
Under-promise, over-deliver.
I agree in principle, but it could be argued that the principle applies in the other direction as well. If you start handing out expected shipping dates (even if you say estimated), peoples expectations will quickly adapt.
All of that said, I'll concede the point that they could have updated the page a bit as said "new orders expected to ship" and a later date, or given "within 2 weeks" or some such, but I wouldn't consider it a major issue.