Decide.com taps the power of the Web with crowdsourced product recommendations

Web shopping site Decide.com has injected a large dose of ‘social’ into its product recommendations feature after it launched ‘Decide Score’, a new ranking system that recommends products by aggregating ratings and reviews from across the Web.

We last wrote about the company when it launched a nifty iPhone app that allows users to monitor prices and buy when the time is right, and now it is turning to the Web’s own expertise to help customers make a buying decision.

The new system is powered by the crowds, and the company explains that it takes information from more than 7,000 product “experts” and some 2 million user-generated reviews to give a far more comprehensive recommendation about a product than you’ll find on services like Amazon.

Further to that point, each product’s Decide Score is calculated out of 100, which puts them into one of four brackets:

• We Love It: 9 percent of products are the highest rated with a “We Love It” recommendation and score of 90 and above
• We Like It: 31 percent of products have a “We Like It”
• You Can Do Better: 48 percent of products fit into a “You Can Do Better” recommendation
• Don’t Buy It: 12 percent of products have a rating that triggers a “Don’t Buy It” recommendation

Commenting on the gradual introduction of the new system, Mike Fridgen, CEO of Decide.com, said:

Decide leverages big data to makes complex shopping decisions easy for consumers. First we introduced when to buy predictions and today we take an important step towards becoming the next-generation consumer advocate by releasing data-driven what to buy recommendations.

The system is out in beta — ranking 22,000 different consumer electronics items — and the company plans to extend it across other categories and products in due course.

Decide.com says it has saved its customers $75 Million since June 2011 thanks to its “Buy” or “Wait” price recommendations.

Image via Shutterstock / Sevenke