What to put in an order status, and what to leave out

Pending, processing, shipped, delivered, cancelled. That is the set we ship with, and in four years almost nobody has genuinely needed a sixth. What people ask for instead is a status that encodes a reason: 'awaiting stock', 'payment held', 'customer unreachable'. These feel like statuses but they are not — they are notes about why an order is stuck in the status it is already in. The difference matters. A status drives what happens next in the workflow. A note explains a delay. If you make every reason a status, your filter dropdown grows to twenty items and nobody can answer 'how many orders are waiting to be packed?' any more. Keep the statuses few and the notes free-form.