I believe you might be right. Also, Apple doesn't even know when people receive their order confirmation email they have to be using a different number internally (and we can only speculate what that might be).
I checked that, and though Apple gave me an alarming different time of order from the one on the email initially (11:23 instead of 09:17!) they then wrote back and said they had made a mistake, and that in their internal system the order time was the same as the one in the email. They emphasised that I had to be patient, and ironically it was just after that that my card was debited!!