Quite infuriating...
You can see the presence of the order of you log in to samsung.com and go to the menu to the right of the profile icon at the top of the page. You then see a bunch of product types and, if you scroll to the bottom, there is "orders'. Click on that and you will see your order number and status (" processing"....)
Click on "more options" and, under the phone details, you will see "payment accepted " in bold with "order acknowledged" as being the next stage in the order process (this, disturbingly, is grey").
I wonder if Samsung Global is using time between acknowledgement and dispatch as a key performance indicator, the metric definition is too stringent to account for pre-orders and there is no one who can successfully, or even had the appetite to challenge in the name of the customer's experience. This might also explain why some European countries are dispatching on order receipt (a different regional office may have a different approach to fudging order management performance to protect the regions targets from aberrant events such as pre-orders). Lucky Belgians!
Looking back through various forums, this has been a long standing cause of worry for customers in the UK.
Just supposition.
