About us

What is a Shortlist?

ShortLists are the new way of ordering your world and helping you find the best of everything.

Our aim is to provide you with definitive best lists across a wide range of categories, from entertainment, tech, style, home, health & fitness and food, with more categories to come in the future.

When a Shortlist warrants it, we’ll go deeper, with a comprehensive and comparative review. Our testers put your next prospective phone, bike light or laptop, through its paces to see how it stacks up against the competition. Our reviews are detailed, impartial, and ad-free. And unlike other sites, we test our products in the real world and keep away from confusing jargon and complex specification data.

How can I get in touch with ShortList.com?

We’d love to hear from you. You can get in touch with us by our contact form here.

Licensing and Reuse of Content:

Contact Future, our publisher, about available usages, license fees, and award seal artwork at [email protected] for more information.

Weren’t you a men’s lifestyle title? What happened?

ShortList was first published all the way back in 2007 and we have a long history of recommending the best in entertainment, tech and style. Now we’ve taken it back to basics, and the new ShortList.com is no longer aimed at men only. We’re here to help everybody list and rank the things they care about.

How is the site funded?

Our core revenue model is affiliate marketing. This means that, where possible, we include buy links to products or services we feature, so that you can click through and purchase from a trusted retailer. If you do click through and make a purchase, we may get a small commission from the retailer in return.

How does this impact your editorial?

Our editorial team are separate from our commercial team. This means that the product choices in our Shortlists and reviews aren’t influenced by commercial interests, and our expert writers are never told to include products for any other reason than they believe they offer good value or performance for the user, or in the case of films, books, and music, are great examples of their type.

How do you choose which retailers to link to?

More often than not we link to Amazon because they have the broadest range of stock, are highly regarded for their customer service and most of our users will already have an account with them. This should make for a quick and painless buying experience.

In cases where Amazon doesn’t sell an item, we’ll link to another well known retailer that we expect to provide you with good customer service. Regardless, we always aim to find you the best price for a product where possible.

But you do still have some advertising on the site?

Yes, on shortlists and news we include a small amount of advertising, similar to the kind of advertising you see alongside content on most sites. But we never include advertising on our reviews, and we never will.

And rest assured, advertisers have no say on what editorial choose to shortlist or review.

So how do you choose the products you write about?

Shortlists are compiled by our writers, journalists with years of experience in their category. They use their expert knowledge to decide which products to include in a Shortlist - then we give readers their say, asking them to upvote or downvote shortlist entries, or suggest entries that we might have missed.

This means that our shortlists, and our reviews, evolve over time. We hope that eventually the order of entries in all of our shortlists is decided by our users.

How do you review products?

Our experts combine their expert knowledge of an area with information from a range of retailers to determine which products to include in a shortlist, and which are worth taking forward for review.

Then they spend time with the products in question to compare each product’s performance with the rest in the group. We’ll never include a product in a review that our expert hasn’t been hands-on with. Once the products have been thoroughly tested, the expert will then pick both a best overall and a best value choice to help you make a buying decision.

If a product stands out for great performance, we’ll tell you. And if a product stands out for all the wrong reasons? We’ll tell you that too.

At the end of each of our reviews we include a feedback form. If there’s something you think we missed out that you’d like us to consider when we update our review, let us know. We’ll feedback to our experts so they can factor this in for future updates.

How are you different than other reviews sites?

As a team, we’ve worked on some of the biggest reviews sites in the world. We believe that we know how to do a great job for you, our readers. That’s why we have a set of agreed ways of working, rules that we are happy to share with our readers:

• Unlike most sites, we don't feature advertising on our news, shortlists or reviews, so you know our choices are entirely independent.
• In depth expert reviews, free of geek-speak, accessible for everybody.
• Be upfront about how the site makes money with users, through affiliates and advertising on news and shortlists.
• Maintain a clear separation between editorial and commercial, so users know that our content is impartial and can be trusted.
• If a product is in a review, one of our experts must have been hands-on with it.
• Products must be tested in the real world, the way our users actually use them.
• Products shouldn’t be reviewed in isolation, but comparatively, so that users can make more informed buying decisions.
• Our reviews are not for sale. We don’t get paid by manufacturers or retailers to review products, and never will. And we will never recommend one product over another because a manufacturer or retailer has asked us to, or paid us to.
• We are a reader-first website. This means we make decisions about what we write about, and how we write about it, based on what’s most helpful for the reader.

EverythingOrdered

It is our ultimate ambition to provide order to everything, but we need your help:

How can I get involved?

As mentioned we want to hear from you if there are items we have missed from our Shortlists or if there is something you want us consider within our more in-depth reviews. You will find a feedback form at the bottom of every Shortlist or Reviewed page.