With four million monthly visitors now flocking to Sortable.com, the Waterloo-based “decision engine” is relaunching its site today with user-experience enhancements.
The Sortable redesign is a direct response to feedback from users, who are increasingly turning to the site to help them decide which products to buy.
“We’re providing a personalized view of the web’s collective knowledge of a product so that we can help people make great purchasing decisions,” said Chris Reid, who co-founded Sortable with Alex Black and Mark Feeney in 2009.
Research has shown that 87 per cent of consumers go online to inform themselves about a product before they buy it. Finding the right information can be a challenge as the number of products proliferates and the sheer volume of data online increases by orders of magnitude each year.
Sortable has set out to solve that problem by using sophisticated algorithms to comb the web and deliver relevant information tailored to the needs of individual consumers.
“It’s our job to go out and read thousands of reviews, parse available data and perspectives, and understand what the web knows about a product,” Reid said. “We then take that intelligence and personalize it for every single user so they can find what is right for them.”
Today’s site relaunch builds on what has already been a momentous year for Sortable. Dubbed a ‘threat’ to Google by the Toronto Star in January, the company was acquired by Waterloo-based Rebellion Media in July, and joined Tsavo Media, Jingu, RMG, UPC360 and Saffron Rouge as founding companies under the Rebellion umbrella. The company has since added several more brands to its portfolio.
Rebellion Media, which launched last week with an exclusive party in Kitchener featuring celebrities from the sports and entertainment world, is led by CEO Ted Hastings, one of Waterloo Region’s most successful and aggressive technology entrepreneurs.
Hastings, who serves as a co-head coach of Communitech’s HYPERDRIVE incubator program, made it clear at the launch that the Rebellion team has ambitions to become a billion-dollar digital media powerhouse.
