It is primarily of alphabetical order and thus more simple and internationally acceptable than the traditional Radical-and-stroke sorting.
The serious disadvantage of pinyin order lies in its disability to support lookup of words without knowing their pronunciations.
[4][2] According to the "Index of Chinese Pinyin Syllables" in Xinhua Dictionary, this rule only involves three pairs of syllables: ⟨e⟩ comes before ⟨ê⟩ e.g. 額 (è), 欸 (ê̄), ⟨lu⟩ before ⟨lü⟩ e.g. 路 (lù), 驢 (lǘ), and ⟨nu⟩ before ⟨nü⟩ e.g. 努 (nǔ), 女 (nǚ).
[9] The Chinese character pinyin sorting method adopts the internationally accepted Latin alphabetical order.
The biggest disadvantage lies in its disability to support look up of characters without knowing their pronunciations (therefore, dictionaries arranged in pinyin order usually have indexes of other sorting methods).