Rewards and coupon websites are notorious for leaching off the affiliate process without driving much incremental revenue. In the heyday of ABestWeb.com they coined the phrase ParasiteWare for places that stuff cookies like this.

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.

> that stuff cookies like this.

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 strict 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 the coupon site, and there's no coupon to be found. No value delivered for merchant or customer, but the coupon site 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. Cookie stuffing doesnt just mean sending a user to an affiliate link, it means specifically loading unrelated sites, usually in the background (or used with js/flash). I'm noting it because you're using the wrong term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cookie_stuffing

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.

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?

[1] https://revlifter.com

I don’t know anything about revlifter. But I’ve been in this space long enough that I’m skeptical of most claims.

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.

This seems very similar to yieldify.com

I imagine the retailer just cares about getting the sale and doesn't really care who they pay the 2% (or whatever) commission fee to? 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 though. Someone like Wirecutter can spend time and money on reviewing items and then can lose out on the referral commission in the end.

They do care. Some affiliate rates are far higher than that.

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 others. It may be cheaper for retailers to have them if they don’t care about pissing off their others affiliates (most are too small to get their voice heard)

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 if 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 doing

90% of affiliates are very small players that don't have any bargaining power. In most modern platforms, all the referrers are tracked.

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.

They have no individual bargaining power, but that doesn't mean they can be ignored. The more you ignore them the more go to greener pastures, the more you do for them the more resources they focus on your business.

In theory, yes. But that's not my personal experience (I'm mostly active in Europe).