Weaknesses
As with book reviews anywhere, the buyer must beware that all reviewers have bias. Under normal circumstances, reviews give the reader at least a modest basis for evaluating whether to buy/read a given book. Because it is an open forum, the reader can benefit from the opinions of different people with different perspectives. However, the anonymity of web reviewers increases the chances of abuse in the form of self-praise, praise from friends, or malicious criticism.
This situation was confirmed in 2004 when the origin of reviews was accidentally made public on an amazon site, and some authors openly confirmed their glowing reviews of their own books (see Trivia below).
Amazon provides a badging option for reviewers, e.g., to indicate the “real name” of the reviewer (based on the credit card name) or to indicate that the reviewer is one of the “top” (most popular) reviewers. Because badging is optional, the risk of abuse remains. Some books have well over one thousand reviews (e.g. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged), but many books, especially new ones, have none. The
Also, it faces some hardware problems. Amazon's decentralized servers often suffer from hardware failures. When this occurs, the entire system is affected and their services can stall and they can lose data.
Lastly, some may argue that waiting for a product delivery is a weakness even though the item offered is immediately shipped and 'instantly' have the item they want.
amazon.com - weaknesses
