The Honey browser extension scam, brought to you by PayPal, class action filed

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

Suppose you saw someone stealing a purse from a little old lady. It's not your problem or mine, but the principle, the sense of maintaining order and justice, including getting that lady back what is hers, still matters to me.

Besides, Honey only did part of the work (like 0.01% when you consider it's automated instead of a real personal shopper stepping in to assist) and none of it to generate the sale, so if anything their max commission should be, IF they came up with a viable coupon, the 5% or whatever %, of the coupon value not the single item from latest click through, and especially not the entire cart contents purchased.

It's also a problem because it drives up prices for everyone. If Honey is making money off non-affiiliate linked purchases, which they seem to be, the merchant is losing money a greater % of the time and will have to increase cost of goods to offset that. My ratio of buying something from a youtuber affiliate link vs independently browsing to a merchant to buy something with no youtuber involved is roughly 1:500. I have practically never, not realized that I needed something until some youtuber told me that I did, lol, so in those 499 cases, merchant makes full profit minus any coupon I find on my own, but does not pay anyone an affiliate commission.

[rant]I have mixed feelings about affiliate commissions in the first place. I see some youtuber making a video and it's like "here's a list of everything in my video", yet what they link, is not necessarily the best of it's type of product, or even the best value for the purpose, not necessarily the cheapest seller of that make/model of product, usually NOT on sale, often higher priced from same merchant than back when the video and link was made if not a very recent video, and even more issues I can't think of at the moment.

Sometimes they're just throwing crap your direction to make more profit, (like do I need to know where you got your phillips screwdriver?!) when it was always dubious to me whether certain channels were worthy of making any profit at all, especially if just stealing or at least heavily repeating content elsewhere instead of generating content worthy of profits, but if someone lands on that channel's video before seeing the other content, it seems like revelatory work put into it, when it just wasn't. I do not dismiss the amount of labor that many channels put into PRODUCING their content, but that's the cart before the horse if the content wasn't worthy in the first place, just a machine cranking out anything for a new video. Obviously this applies much more to some channels than others, even more so for the non-tech channels.

At the same time, free will and all, people can patronize anything that youtube shoves at them, and buy whatever they want, but how much affiliate commission do they really deserve if they are just rehashing content from a different channel, or even their OWN channel? Still more than Honey, the way I see it. [/rant]

This is more like Bezos stuffing his hand in Thiel's pocket. Let'em have at it a long as I get my 10%.

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

Never really understood the concept of 'coupons'. There are certain on-line vendors that offer 'coupons', but as far as I can tell it's just an overly-complicated way to have a sale. i.e. they tell you on the home page itself to enter this code at checkout, and then if you do you get, say, 10% off. I don't really grasp the point of it - why don't they just reduce all their prices by 10% for the duration of the validity of the coupon/duration of the sale (which are basically the same thing)?

I can only assume it's some weird psychological trick to make you more conscious of getting a 'bargain' - but not sure it's any different from traditional sales (Steam seems to manage perfectly well at sucking in fools like me to buy too much in such time-limited sales, without employing all the 'coupon' nonsense). Installing some browser extension to 'find' such coupons seems pointless (and potentially a spyware risk).

With a posted sale, everybody that buys during the sale gets the sale price. With a coupon, only those who present the coupon get that price. That may reduce the number of buyers getting the discount by a significant number.

Now companies are furthering that by not printing and mailing coupons and requiring 'digital' coupons on your mobile device which you have to present by displaying it for them to scan, or entering your mobile number. Not only does that reduce the number of people participating, but it adds the element of digital tracking and gathering personal information.

 

[pmv]

With a posted sale, everybody that buys during the sale gets the sale price. With a coupon, only those who present the coupon get that price. That may reduce the number of buyers getting the discount by a significant number.

Now companies are furthering that by not printing and mailing coupons and requiring 'digital' coupons on your mobile device which you have to present by displaying it for them to scan, or entering your mobile number. Not only does that reduce the number of people participating, but it adds the element of digital tracking and gathering personal information.

It just seems a bit silly when sites put the coupon code right there on their web-page, and then require you to type it in at the payment step.

OK, some people won't remember or won't notice it, but to the exact extent they do that the promotional effect of having the offer doesn't happen either, so if there's any point in making such offers in the first place, from an increased sales point-of-view, I still don't see the advantage of doing it that way vs just reducing the price.

True, in some cases it might give the store additional information about the customer, that's a legit point, but for an on-line store that you have to register with in the first place before you can buy anything, I don't see that coupons add any value.

Even with B&M stores I've pretty much had it with coupons and loyalty card schemes. They slow everything down in the checkout queues, and I've had too many problems with the schemes not working as advertised (there are lots of stories out there about internal fraud occurring with such loyalty 'point collecting' schemes - people getting their point balances stolen by people inside the stores', often off-shore-based, loyalty point scheme's operators).

Just lower the damn prices and stop messing customers about with ever-more complicated discount schemes. Especially as B&M stores are reducing their costs by getting rid of most of their staff and making the customer do all the work.

 

[mindless1]

With a posted sale, everybody that buys during the sale gets the sale price. With a coupon, only those who present the coupon get that price. That may reduce the number of buyers getting the discount by a significant number.

Yes, and that's EXACTLY the way I want it. Why give discounts to bums who don't want to put forth the effort, then the widget is sold out (or # of items earmarked for the sale has been met) by the time I see the deal?

Were you under the impression that sales on things are infinite? There's always a stock limit or # of sales limit, though if it is a coupon that can be used on many different items, there isn't that customer focus on singular items being on sale and selling out faster, so everyone has more of a chance to get a discount on whatever they wanted.

Now companies are furthering that by not printing and mailing coupons and requiring 'digital' coupons on your mobile device which you have to present by displaying it for them to scan, or entering your mobile number. Not only does that reduce the number of people participating, but it adds the element of digital tracking and gathering personal information.

I agree that digital coupons on a mobile device can be annoying, especially if after you redeem the coupon, it still stays in your digital wallet, not even being earmarked as already used, but it was also a bit of a hassle to have to sort through mail and ad packs tossed onto my lawn, look through those and physically clip out coupons and take them with me to a store.

I'm not terribly concerned about digitally tracking what I buy at each individual brick and mortar. That's far less than Goggle does. Sometimes it's even a benefit because certain stores will print out coupons for things I buy, on the back of the paper receipt given at checkout.

I don't see how this is relevant to the online purchases where Honey is undermining the intent of affiliate commissions, and potentially gathering your personal information too.

The original affiliate providing the link, like a link you see under a youtube video, that affiliate has no mechanism to gather your personal info, nothing. Honey on the other hand, well check out this:

More than just coupon codes: Browser extension Honey also collects their user’s history data · datarequests.org

Our investigation shows: The free browser extension Honey doesn't just collect coupon codes. Using the GDPR's right to data access, we have confirmed that they also permanently store their user's history data on a large scale. That's why we have submitted complaints.

www.datarequests.org

 

[dlerious]

Another lawsuit

 

[Heartbreaker]

Nice one.

I like how GN points out how it has less impact on big channels like his, but really kills the little guys that are much more dependent on it.

That's what makes it even more heinous. It's a massive corporation, going Reverse Robin Hood on small timer creators.