I just experienced my first ever glitch with the online Apple Store. Last week, I put together an order in the education sub-store, and saved it until monday when I placed it. After placing the order, I noticed that it didn't show up in my Order Status page. I never received any confirmation email. And manually entering the order number I was given in the more direct order status app never yielded a result. (This was made worse when the order status application seemed to go down yesterday). Finally, I noticed that there was no credit card activity surrounding the order either.
So I called the Apple Store for customer service, and it appears the order was a phantom - no shipping/billing or credit card information was saved. After some checking, the customer service representative said it's a good bet that order would never be completed and I could place the order again without worry of double billing (and receiving two of the same product), and that if that did happen, they would willingly take returns and refund on the duplicates.
So I placed the order again this morning, and it immediately showed up in my order status page. Now - it's just countdown until Panther arrives. To be followed by a long-needed firewire hard drive.
Note: This is the only problem I ever had with the Apple Store, and they took care of it quickly once I contacted them. It was just...curious.