They capture the most valuable sales--i.e., those made with the immediate intent to purchase--and direct those purchasers to the cheapest site in exchange for a commission.
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 page which is the final step of the purchase funnel when the product, the seller and the purchase has already been decided.
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.
I'm getting their points from doing online grocery order directly from the supermarket site for example.
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?
This is no different then a user visiting a different website about the same product and clicking through the affiliate link on that new blogger's page before making the purchase.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I don’t use honey so don’t know the mechanics of how it works.
However, I have used their add-on and it does not work the way you described.
Oh wait, you say you're just a guy on the internet and you don't work for anyone in the industry? Yeah, pal, same here. The difference is that I base my comments on having used Honey as a customer, not on some random comment based on a random comment by someone who hasn't actually used the product 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.
This is incorrect. Honey does not redirect you to different/cheaper retailers.
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.
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.
The overall affiliate channel has become increasingly challenging to manage profitably from a merchant perspective. But it’s very easy for a “manager” to see all of the sales affiliates “drive” and assume that it’s making them money.
If you let affiliate sell for you, you had better invest in a professional affiliate manager that you can trust. If you source it to an intern you’ll lose a ton of money to leeches and fraud.
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.
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.
I usually try to build flows now that don’t ask for coupon codes at checkout (because that leads to deal searching right at the last moment). 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: they registered a unique domain (namecheapcoupons.com) that publicly list all coupon codes. 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.
It certainly sucks for the blogs and websites trying to fund their content with affiliate links though. Someone like Wirecutter can spend time and money on reviewing items and then can lose out on the referral commission in the end.
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.
I'm pretty sure that big players do complain and they'll get a "first cookie" or at least partial attribution for the sales they make.
Just look at Honey Droplist https://www.joinhoney.com/features/droplist. Let's say that I wanted to buy a product but I think I'd rather buy it at 5% off. Or let's say that I just put it on droplist for no reason and am not that interested to buy it. Honey could literally provide this information to retailers and suggest price drops and email honey users to create demand. Now, when you see a 10% price drop notifications, you being prone to scarcity are so much more likely to buy. And that's why this data is so valuable.
Now on top of this, you got rewards programs, payment splitting programs (https://www.joinhoney.com/honeypay/overview) (which provide yet another advantage, you got a discount but still can't afford to pay, how about you only have to a quarter of the price right now?), a mobile app with 100+ stores integrated in a single app, it adds up!
In some sense Honey can steal the affiliate commissions from blogs and other websites since you use Honey right before the sale.