spoiler
It seems the Honey Coupon extension wasn’t just making money by tracking purchases from users, but also by taking credit for the sales for PayPal (since they are owned by it) by changing your local cookies. Pretty shady if you ask me.
Reposting my tl;dw from another post:
Affiliate injection: When you click the “Find coupons” button, it will inject their affiliate cookie. This is somewhat okay in normal circumstances, but if you visit a site/store via (insert YouTuber) 's sponsorship and use a Honey coupon, it will override theirs and use Honey’s. The YouTuber loses the profit they would’ve made, and instead, PayPal/Honey gets it, despite the YouTuber doing the work. It will also inject their affiliate cookie if you click find coupons and it doesn’t find any, or if you click okay on their “We didn’t find any coupons, but this is the best deal!” popup.
Misdirection: They will show that they found the “best deal” while intentionally leaving off higher coupon deals; if a company has a partnership with Honey, they may, for example, have a 10% promotion running. With a honey partnership, they may ask Honey only to give users a 5% coupon and say it’s the “best deal” or tell users no coupons are available despite some being available (even if added to their database), so they pay a small affiliate fee to Honey in exchange for lowering the rates they give in coupons so they can still say they are giving them, but use them as little as possible.
Honey Gold cashback: This one, in combination with the above, gives you 1 1-2% of the order, but they make substantially more than they pass to the user anyway. This one is to be expected, but it is a reminder that they still do “normal” scam stuff on top of their notable scammy practices.
tl;dr: They scam you and your favorite content creators with misleading practice and affiliate injection; the only true “winners” with Honey and other similar services are the service themselves and the stores they partner with.
Reposting the same comment I made on another post:
It’s not just Honey swapping the affiliate codes. Practically all the major coupon sites do it too. That’s why they require you to click on a coupon code to reveal it. When you click, they usually reveal the coupon code in a new tab, and helpfully redirect the current tab to the store, using their affiliate link.
It’s more obvious when websites do it though, since they can’t auto-close the tab like Honey does. They also don’t automatically pop up at checkout like Honey does.
I imagine some of the other coupon extensions do the exact same thing as Honey though.
Yup. And this is why all these coupon sites exist. Absolutely none of them would be running this long if they weren’t profiting off it.
Nah, even without affiliate code shenanigans, there have been coupon sites for like forever. People REALLY want to find codes, it’s the best bait to fill their screen with ads, popups, malware, and whatever.
Thanks for the share and the new channel added to my favs!
The woman’s voice on the podcast was very AI’ish… I mean, the way she spoke, the wording… I know this is mostly marketing shit speaking, but that was the first thing that poped up into my mind when I heard her.
