Website

The domain amazon.com attracted at least 615 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com survey. This was twice the numbers of walmart.com.^[16]

A popular feature of Amazon is the ability for users to submit reviews to the web page of each product. As part of their review, users must rate the product on a rating scale from one to five stars. Such rating scales provide a basic idea of the popularity and dependability of a product.

The review feature is an important and highly influential function for customers and one of the main reasons for amazon.com’s success at selling books. 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 a given book.

Because it is an open forum, the reader can benefit from a variety of 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.

Additionally, Amazon created a feature in recent years that allowed users to comment on reviews. This has been met with a mixed reaction, since a few of the high-profile sellers have been getting "spammed" in these forums, regardless of the quality of the reviews. Amazon has done little to enforce the rules of these forums, but did recently add an "ignore" button feature to help counteract the spamming. Nonetheless, at least one critic in the top 50 quit writing for Amazon and began contributing to another site due to the spam issues and Amazon's inability to enforce the rules.^[17]

Amazon provides an optional badging option for reviewers, e.g., to indicate the “real name” of the reviewer (based on a credit card) or to indicate that the reviewer is one of the “top” (most popular) reviewers. Some books have well over one thousand reviews (e.g. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged), but many books, especially new ones, have none.

The U.S. site generally has the most reviews, but other country sites offer the perspectives of other reviewers. A review posted on one site is not necessarily visible on another site.

Search Inside the Book is a feature which allows customers to search for keywords in the full text of many books in the catalog.^[18][19] The feature started with 120,000 titles (or 33 million pages of text) on October 23, 2003. There are currently about 250,000 books in the program. Amazon has cooperated with around 130 publishers to allow users to perform these searches.

To avoid copyright violations, Amazon.com does not return the computer-readable text of the book but rather a picture of the matching page, disables printing, and puts limits on the number of pages in a book a single user can access. One author observed that his entire book could be read online by searching a few words^[20]. Amazon is planning to launch Search Inside the Book internationally. Additionally, customers can purchase access to the entire book online via the Amazon Upgrade program, although the selection of books eligible for this service is currently limited.

According to information in Amazon.com discussion forums, Amazon derives about 40% of its sales from affiliates whom they call "Associates", and third party sellers who list and sell products on the Amazon website(s).

An Associate is an independent seller or business that receives a commission for referring customers to the Amazon.com site. Associates do this by placing links on their websites to the Amazon homepage or to specific products. If a referral results in a sale, the Associate receives a commission from Amazon. Worldwide, Amazon has "over 900,000 members" in its affiliate programs.^[21] Associates can access the Amazon catalog directly on their websites by using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) XML service.

Amazon was one of the first online businesses to set up an affiliate marketing program.^[22] AStore is a new affiliate product that allows Associates to embed a subset of Amazon products within, or linked to from, another website.

Amazon reported over 1.3 million sellers sold products through Amazon's worldwide web sites in 2007. Selling on Amazon has become more popular as Amazon expanded into a variety of categories beyond media, and built a variety of features to support volume selling. Unlike eBay/Paypal, Amazon sellers do not have to maintain separate payment accounts - all payments and payment security are handled by Amazon itself.

According to the Internet audience measurement website Compete.com, Amazon attracts approximately 50 million U.S. consumers to its website on a monthly basis.^[23]