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Comment by imtringued | Hacker News Reader

Uhm no? If Honey was running a legitimate affiliate marketing scheme, they would be upfront about the fact that they get an affiliate commission and that you benefit from this arrangement, because they are giving you part of the affiliate commission as cashback. This in itself is a very honest way of running an affiliate marketing business.

Except Honey doesn't do that. Online shops pay Honey to ignore the best coupons, so that the customer will pay more than if they had looked for the coupons themselves. They run a cashback scheme that is no different than e.g. payback cards, but they deceptively fund it using affiliate marketing, meaning that the user is getting a pittance in savings in comparison to what honey gets.

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You're getting caught up in the social media hysteria. Honey's partnership with merchants to create Honey-specific coupons is relatively new, Honey was sold to PayPal long before they had any partnerships with merchants, Honey's value (as a business) and revenue comes from the pure affiliate marketing: getting attribution for sales. Honey has never hidden this: https://web.archive.org/web/20191121204313/https://help.join...

They never made it clear that they always replaced others affiliate links, like the creators affiliates that also promoted honey, and also did it even when they didn't find any codes. And did this at checkout.

How could they have been any clearer? Just because some creators didn’t realise they were being paid by Honey to cannibalise their own affiliate commissions does not mean Honey hid it. A number of creators have said this realisation about Honey has prompted them to take a closer look at how the companies they advertise work: that’s an admission of doing zero diligence when choosing to work with an advertiser.

The entire point of Honey is that it is activated at checkout: how else could it work?

Also ask yourself about the merchants involved: did NordVPN know about the relationship between Honey and affiliate commissions? Of course, they were paying Honey too. And yet NordVPN chose to use last-click attribution for deals with influencers.

> The entire point of Honey is that it is activated at checkout: how else could it work?

There is a (imo bad faith) argument that Honey directs you to a cheaper vendor (How? When? I’ve never seen it) thus saving the consumer money. I have never seen anyone use Honey this way and I’m not even sure what user behavior / UI they have built up around this flow but I feel it’s just to cover their ass.

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