It just means it was barcode-scanned on a conveyor belt (or a digital manifest submitted), and is now sitting in a bin or back of a truck awaiting the next leg of its journey.
That's true, but I knew that was the case here; it comes from a firm called PrecisionGeek.
I But all the promises and failures are Amazon's. Also only bothering to notify me after I'd waited when they must have known it was going to be late much earlier (and probably very likely to be late seeing as the items were in Italy).
So now (20:14) the package has 'departed an Amazon facility Bardon Hill...'
I'm optimistic that this will be a big van doing a series of drop-offs at distribution centres at various points in my direction ending somewhere near Littlehampton (my local depot).
On a totally unrelated topic, I was once told that in the days when homosexuality was illegal, a common coded approach was to ask the time, presumably in a suitably suggestive manner. If the reply came back "12 O'Clock" then that was confirmation of mutual interest. I always thought that the towns Southampton and Northampton could be worked into a similar code; which begs the question of how Littlehampton would fit in.
On another unrelated note, a friend of mine who went on to great things in Newspaper editorship once worked for the Maidenhead Advertiser which I thought would be a wonderful name for a medieval contact magazine.