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Comment by kevindong | Hacker News Reader

Major retailers typically have affiliate programs in which if an affiliate (say Honey) refers a customer to the retailer and the customer then makes a purchase, then the retailer will pay out a commission to the affiliate.

This model is substantially similar to RetailMeNot, except Honey will automatically try every coupon they know of for you automatically.

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But when does Honey ever refer a customer to a product? My impression is that you only ever use Honey when you're already about to make a sale -- you go to the product page, and Honey finds a discount for you.

I'm not super familiar, does Honey run any advertisements or recommendations for products? It makes sense why I might pay a blogger affiliate revenue for referring a reader to my product, but I'm not going to pay someone an affiliate link to someone who claims they influenced a purchase decision where the customer is already sitting on the checkout page. If I go to an Amazon product page, will Honey give me a recommendation for a different product that's lower priced?

Most affiliate networks are pretty shit about tracking. Last click attribution is how it generally works. Some have started keeping track of when you landed vs when you got the affiliate link, but it’s a grey area as far as user intent.

Let’s say I got to checkout and after tax and shipping the product was too expensive. I use Honey or search for a coupon and the price goes down and I complete a sale.

Did the deal site offer value? Arguable.

That happened to me literally an hour ago. I checked out and when the shipping was added the price felt high. I left the cart open and started browsing Reddit. I was waffling on the purchase. Then I remembered to Google for coupon codes and I found one and put it in and at the new price I checked out.

This is probably why honey is legit

If you were going to buy something from Amazon and Honey tells you it's cheaper at Walmart, Walmart would reasonably want to pay Honey for driving business to them.

> does Honey run any advertisements or recommendations for products?

They can drive a sale by tracking prices and notify you of a drop in price. That might be one case where they help make a sale that wasn't otherwise going to happen.

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