Does honey make money

That night, after the kids went to bed, he put together a prototype for a browser extension that could help solve his problem. InHudson ran out of money, and took a day job as a product manager at an ad tech company to pay the bills. The Honey browser extension automatically offers up coupon codes and «Honey Gold» deals at checkout. Hudson says Honey is currently profitable, but does not disclose revenue. It has a 4. Honey has so far chosen not hhoney monetize its product everywhere it could — for instance, Hudson pointed out, a price-comparison toolbar «would monetize insanely well» but it makes for an annoying consumer experience. Honey’s «Drop List» feature allows users to track price changes.

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The browser extension Honey provides coupons for online shoppers and enables consumers to accrue purchase rebates. Honey is a free browser extension that automatically finds and applies coupon codes at checkout for over 30, shopping sites. We also instantly find better prices on Amazon and offer Honey Gold at many stores for our U. Over five years ago, Ryan Hudson went online to order a pizza — dinner for his two kids, who were then under 6 years old. That night, after the kids went to bed, he put together a prototype for a browser extension that could help solve his problem. In October , the MIT-trained entrepreneur, along with co-founder George Ruan, used that prototype to build and launch Honey, a web browser extension that automatically finds and surfaces coupons when a user is online shopping. On the surface, Honey performs a few primary functions for users in the course of online purchases. As an extension running in the background, it automatically prompts shoppers to check for any active coupons in its database during most checkout processes, and it can also can product prices for long-term planning of purchases, enabling its users to monitor pricing trends with very little effort. Not long after the thread was posted, founder George Ruan addressed the claims in a comment explaining the manner in which Honey finances both its operations and its rebates and denying that user data is ever sold to or shared with third parties:.

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Honey saves people money in 2 ways: 1 automatically applying coupons on the checkout page and 2 giving you extra cash back with every purchase. This is the only way to appear ONLY when you are on the checkout page. In order to give our users cash back on their purchase, we need to know that a transaction happened so we can match up the records with merchants. Honey makes money by getting a commission from merchants and then giving a portion of it back to our user as cash back. The focus of that thread was the vulnerability of any browser extension to exploitation to bad actors. In his initial post, Ruan said:. We turned them all down. In a followup comment on that thread, Ruan explained how purveyors of malware could exploit extensions such as Honey:. What do they offer an extension developer?

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When Honey starting growing, it moved fast

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After all they want those high value affiliates to continue doing what they are doing. My mistake and thanks for pointing that out. In most modern platforms, all the referrers are tracked. Integrated with PayPal however has the potential to become a big earner in terms of fees and new customers. Guess what: if you have your own coupons, you can submit them to the Honey site for additional discounts. CydeWeys 61 days ago They’re paying for the large existing userbase, regardless of how that large userbase was acquired. Those are all good points. Honey actually works to find coupons that you can combine to save even more money. Hope that makes sense. They don’t steal affiliate commissions. There is money to be made, it is theirs to lose. Now, you can go beyond shopping for products online and apply the same savings strategy to shopping for travel. That one is new to me, Gina.

The trick was appealing to retailers along with consumers

By using the Triple Savings Trick, it means I am getting the cashback discount, the maximum discount using any and all coupon codes, and then the discount at the end with a bargain gift card. It’s fine if you guys want talk out of your rears but at least be honest about what you’re doing. Their cash-back shopping is fairly standard among honej sites, and the relatively low threshold for cashing out gives it a slight edge. By any hhoney understanding of «selling your data», Honey does exactly. Something too good to be true is rarely too good. This post may contain affiliate links or links from our sponsors. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Just curious about your tripple savings trick. Honey also does not, in my experience, attempt to redirect you to other retailers as some other comments have suggested. However, considering it is PayPal This means we spend just over 6 hours every year searching online for a promo code before we hit the checkout button! They have no individual bargaining power, but that doesn’t mean they can be ignored. As you start to use the Honey, you will accumulate points which you can later redeem for Amazon Gift Cards. Honey could literally provide this information to retailers and suggest price drops and email honey users to create demand.

Is the browser extension Honey (which automatically applies coupons and finds deals) real or a scam?

How does Honey make money, aside from the dose data collection? I know a few people who use it, and I’ve cautioned them in the past that I can’t think of any savory business model that would make this profitable. Is there one? Is it just tracking purchases for advertisers, or is there some other monetization strategy I’m missing?

Their main site says they make commissions, but I don’t know how to square that with the way consumers use it — which is to find coupons from other sites. Honey isn’t like a credit card, is it? If I’m a retailer, I don’t know why I’d pay a company money for them to scrape coupons from other sites — and it’s not like Honey is going to stop scraping coupons for my products if I don’t pay them money, right?

I’ve read that part of what they do is effectively steal affiliate referrals from other websites. Say you click on an affiliate referral link from a blog that takes you to retailers website. Normally that blog would get a cut of whatever you buy at that retailer.

However, if you then use your Honey extension, their affiliate link takes over and gets credit for the sale. Honey can then give you a small discount that is a portion of their affiliate commission. In some sense Honey can steal the affiliate commissions from blogs and other websites since you use Honey right before the sale. They don’t steal affiliate commissions. They capture the most valuable hojey. It comes down to a question of what is more valuable to the seller.

The blogger may have created the intent to purchase the product but Honey created the intent to purchase from the specific seller. And to the seller, that is far more valuable, especially as a lot of Honey-generated sales may have been sales that would have otherwise gone to competitors. They insert themselves on the cart mxke which is the final step of the purchase funnel when the product, the seller and the purchase monwy already been decided.

The blog’s affiliate never makes a sale in the first place so of course it never pays. For the blog, the outcome is the same as if you took the time to price shop manually and ended up picking a different retailer. Honey’s just automating that process. No, that’s not correct. You can get rewards from the page you’re already on, whether it’s the cheapest or not. You’re not redirected and you’re not incentivised to switch the retailer.

I’m getting their points from doing online grocery order directly from the supermarket site for example. But is that superceding another site’s affiliate link, or did you just go straight to the mlney yourself? I’m going directly to the website. How mnoey they Honey know, though? Hpney 60 days ago. It’s a browser extension. Ok, I get how they do technically, but how the shops let honey insert they affiliate id and take a cut when the user has come directly from a maoe Based on what you surmised, Honey essentially acts as a middle man between two businesses.

Did I get that right or am I missing something here? Honey isn’t inserting does honey make money between the blogger and the seller automatically. The doed is doing that when they use the Honey add-on after visiting the blogger’s website. This is no different then a user visiting a different website about honfy same product and clicking through the affiliate link on that new blogger’s page before making the purchase. That is, if you read honet blog post and get linked to an Amazon page, does honey not hobey to capture a commission there?

What if you open the add on to compare prices but still end up purchasing from Amazon? Do you work for them? It sounds like you work for. I don’t uoney for them, nor do I hoeny any of their employees. However, I have used their add-on and it does not work the way you described. The parent is coming across hobey obtuse to the point where I wonder if it’s intentional.

It sounds a lot like the two of you work for one deos Honey’s competitors. You both are coming across as obtuse to the point where I wonder if it’s intentional.

Oh wait, you say you’re just a guy on the internet amke you don’t work for anyone in the industry? Yeah, pal, same. The difference is that I base my comments mmoney having used Honey as a customer, not on some random comment based on a random comment by someone who hasn’t actually used the mojey we’re all talking about it.

It’s fine if you guys want talk out of your rears but at least be honest about what you’re doing. Reason mkney days ago. Honey is a browser plugin which applies coupon codes scraped from the web to reduce the cost of the purchase from the retailer at the checkout phase. BLanen 61 days ago. Be warned your comment is likely mkney violation of the the Guidelines: Please don’t post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like.

It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you’re worried about abuse, email us and we’ll look at the data. Hojey are online retailers ok with this? Surely this violates referral kickback ToS or something? Rewards and coupon websites dooes notorious for leaching off the affiliate process without driving much incremental revenue.

In the heyday of ABestWeb. The overall affiliate channel has become increasingly challenging to manage profitably coes a merchant perspective. If you let affiliate sell for you, you had better invest in a professional affiliate manager that you can trust.

It should be noted that cookie stuffing is a term for a specific process where a site will inject cookies for thousands of sites with their own referral code on pageload of a landing site they control. It is highly illegal and people have served jail time for it, as it is considered fraud.

What coupon sites do is they tend to hide codes behind a button that onclick will load the retailer’s site with their affiliate code, then show the code. Sure, you can note that, and that’s helpful, but other than in the mqke legal sense, many coupon code sites do engage in other forms of coupon stuffing. For example, many display fake coupons which don’t exist or which they know are expired, and which you must click to reveal.

Upon clicking, the target site opens in a new window, and a cookie is dropped. The user was already buying the product anyway, and perhaps another affiliate was set to get the referral commission, but now this accidental popup has stolen it for dles coupon site, and there’s no coupon to be. No value delivered for merchant or customer, but the coupon honsy makes money.

There’s a lot of forms of cookie stuffing that are legal, or at least grey, and still seem to me like cookie stuffing, even though they aren’t standard, clear-cut, illegal cookie stuffing fraud. That’s not cookie stuffing, that’s just being deceptive. I’m noting it because you’re using the wrong term. I disagree that there is a monopoly on the term. But even if we accept that, my example meets the requirements of the page you linked.

Read it more carefully. Flenser 61 days ago. What about services like revlifter[1] where you put their script on your basket page and they give customers offers based on their basket contents? I prefer dedicated URLs with embedded offers as much as possible. If you need to go the coupon code route, I recommend how Namecheap does it: maks registered a unique domain namecheapcoupons.

They rank 1 in organic search results. But, as a general rule, I encourage you to avoid working with deal sites and coupon affiliates. This is a general rule, but they tend to drive very little incremental revenue. You should also disallow any PPC campaigns using your branded terms.

This seems very similar to yieldify. Shouldn’t make too much of a difference whether they pay the commission to Honey or to some random blog. It certainly sucks for the blogs and websites trying to fund their content with affiliate links.

Someone like Wirecutter can spend time and money on reviewing doea and then can lose out on the referral commission in the end. They do care. Some affiliate rates are far higher than. Affiliate comes out of retailer marketing budgets.

They set the rates thinking they’re paying for certain types of customers from certain participants. Honey is getting paid what the retailers think it’s worth — they’re skeptical, but it seems to be driving incremental conversion for especially price-sensitive shoppers. Coupons affiliates typically get a lower rev share than. I think we’re in agreement.

The numbers through Honey probably look good, and the other affiliates probably don’t have a good handle on how frequently they’re getting scooped by other affiliates. But amke the other affiliates are more valuable then merchants do care if they piss them off. After all they want those high value affiliates to continue doing what they are mney.

In most modern platforms, all the referrers are tracked.

When shopping on Amazon, it will alert you if a product is available for a lower price from a different selling or different listing. It can also pull up a price history of items on Amazon, so you don’t overspend on an item that sees regular discounts. The Honey app is a browser extensionor add-on, that can save you money by automatically searching for coupons on most foes your favorite shopping sites.

The shopping app that saves you money while you sit back and watch

It’s available for all of the major web browsers, and it’s a lot easier than manually sifting through dods sites like RetailMeNot. Honey works by looking at the items in your cart on most popular shopping websites and then searching for relevant coupon codes. If it finds any working codes, it enters them automatically, and you end up saving money without the hard work of searching for and entering them manually. Some sites have partnered with Honey for the HoneyGold program. When you check out on one of these sites, clicking on the Honey extension icon will reveal an option that says Today’s Reward Ratemondy by a percentage, and a button that says Activate. Click this button, and you will be eligible to receive cashback from HoneyGold after you complete your purchase. The Honey coupon app is only available as a browser extension, so you can only use it with a compatible web browser. You can use Honey whenever you shop, and it works on thousands of different sites. Some of the most popular sites where Honey is available include:. If you don’t see does honey make money of your favorite sites, it doesn’t hurt to install the extension and check.