From 9to5Google: PayPal’s Honey has been a massively popular Chrome extension for years, promising to find coupon codes and save consumers money, all without costing a dime. However, a recent video exposed shady tactics by Honey, and has led to over 3 million Chrome users uninstalling the extension.
Honey’s promise to users is that it will help users “score the lowest price” for digital retailers by “[looking] for and [applying] digital coupons and promo codes.” It’s easy to see the appeal there, but as with anything, it doesn’t do this for free. Instead of charging customers, Honey, and extensions like it, have always taken advantage of affiliate programs which pay out a fee for referral sales. So, by using Honey, you’re effectively telling the retailer that Honey is the one that sent you and, as such, Honey gets a small kickback from your purchase.
This practice was met with blowback through a recent video from MegaLag, where the video showed evidence that Honey will replace an affiliate code from another source – such as a YouTube video or website like our own – with Honey’s, in turn taking credit for the sale and “stealing” the fee from that other referral. It’s called “last click attribution” and is always how this has worked, but many users and creators alike were clearly unaware of this.
More worrying in the video, however, were reveals of how Honey is doing the exact opposite of what it promises to do.
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