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Comment by Ukv | Hacker News Reader

People are upset that:

1. Honey makes money through deals with retailers to not offer the best coupon code to the extension's users

2. Honey swaps out the referral code from the blog/video/etc. that actually referred you to the product with their own, even when they didn't find any coupon deal

Merely "Honey makes commissions from our merchant partners" is not at all a "very upfront" description of that behavior. Moreover, many of the people affected by this are reviewers/etc. who have never themselves used Honey so had no particular reason to look into how it works.

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The two together results in honey essentially being paid instead of real affiliates to suppress coupon codes from you(since they advertise to stores that they direct users away from finding coupons, and towards a more stable discount percentage).

This is hard to grasp. Do I understand correctly that some web pages may display a coupon code for a discount on some possible future sale. And the Honey extension detects this coupon code and replaces it with a different coupon with less discount? This all seems so absurd, making money by skimming hypothetical discounts.

From what I understand, no, they don’t replace coupons you’ve entered.

Honey’s advertising message was “never search for a coupon again” and “we’ll ensure you always have the best discount possible”. However in reality a merchant could sign up as a Honey partner and for a mere 3-5% commission they’d let you set the coupons that Honey would show.

So for example if your business gave a 20% promotional coupon to a small community, you could set Honey to ignore it and only show a 5% coupon in the coupon search. People with the 20% coupon will still get to use it, but Honey will never supply it.

So not only was Honey removing affiliate revenue from the people promoting it, it wasn’t giving the people using it the best deal that it promised.

thanks for the explanation.

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