Are order delays normal right now, or should I be worried?

Same boat here. I ordered a kit in late August and it sat on 'processing' with no ship date for over a month. Like you, my earlier orders had shipped within two weeks, so I kept refreshing the account page assuming something was wrong with my order specifically. Turns out it was just a backlog thing. Mine eventually shipped without any email beforehand, I only noticed because the payment status flipped to completed and tracking appeared a day later. So if yours is stuck in processing, that at least means it's in the queue, not lost or cancelled. The contact form is basicly a black hole in my experience. What actually worked was replying directly to my order confirmation email, since that thread is allready tied to my order number and gets picked up by the shop side rather than general support. I got a real answer within a couple of days that way, including a rough week rather than a date. Worth trying if the form stays quiet. Also check the product page itself, not just your account. They've been updating the listed lead times on the store pages when batches slip, and that's often more current than what your order shows. If the page says something like 5 to 6 weeks, that's probably what you're looking at from order date, not from today. On timing for planning purposes, I'd mentally budget closer to your two month scenario than two weeks right now. A friend ordered around the same time as me and his shipped about three weeks after mine, so the queue is moving, just slowly and with no heads up. And since your print quality is slipping in the meantime, it might be worth checking wheather any of it is a quick fix like a worn nozzle or loose belt, because if the kit includes parts that overlap, you don't want to replace something twice. No harm in tuning what you can while you wait.

Been through a few of these shipping lulls over the years, going all the way back to waiting months for an MK2 kit when they were running the original backlog. The pattern never really changes, they just don't update order pages very often. One thing I used to do back then, and still works, is check the date stamp on the shop's own announcement posts. If the lead time note there is older than a week, take it with a grain of salt. As for the slipping quality while you wait, this is where the old tricks still earn their keep. Drop the bed, clean the sheet with dish soap and hot water, and run a first layer calibration from scratch. Half the time what feels like a dying machine is just a fussy first layer that crept out of spec over months. Costs you nothing but an evening and it might hold you over until the kit lands.

Mine did the same thing a while back, sat there for ages then randomly shipped on a Friday with the tracking number showing up before the order status ever moved. Don't trust the account page, it's always lagging behind reality. One thing to watch though, sometimes the kits ship in multiple boxes that arrive a day or two apart, so don't panic if the first one shows up and it looks like parts are missing.

Agree with the guy who said the account page lags behind reality. Mine sat on 'processing' for about five weeks over the holidays and the status never changed once, even after the box was on a truck. I only found out because I got a shipping confirmation in my spam folder of all places, checked it three days after it went out. Also had the multi box thing happen, the second box showed up two days later with the bearings and some bags of hardware in it, so count the parts against the checklist before you assume anything is missing. Reply to your order confirmation email like was suggested upthread, that's how I finally got a human response too.

While you're stuck waiting, honestly just do the maintenance pass yourself. Mine dragged on forever last year and I got tired of babysitting the order page, so I did the basics by hand: cleaned the sheet with dish soap, ran a first layer calibration, swapped in a fresh nozzle. Print quality came right back and the kit ended up being less urgent by the time it landed. Cost me like fifteen bucks and an evening. Way better than putting off jobs for two months over a part you might not even need. Check the PTFE tube and the extruder gear teeth too, those two cause most of the slow quality drift I've seen.

Update: went back through my email and checked spam like one of you suggested, nothing there yet. Order page still stuck on processing. The one thing I'm wondering now, since someone mentioned kits can arrive in seprate boxes, do they ship those togehter or days apart? If it's staggered I want to know before I start pulling the printer apart.