That's fair.

But consider a retailer who has budget to spend with the goal of increasing sales. Here's a study one of the largest affiliate networks did on shopping extensions - https://junction.cj.com/article/cj-demystifies-shopping-brow...

It boils down to making numbers go up. Maybe for you, Honey doesn't do much. But add Honey to the picture, and retailers are seeing an increase in sales and a decrease in cart abandonment. So you choose to partner with a coupon company and pay them commission and for some percentage of users, seeing that popup pushed them over the edge to make the purchase.

In the attribution chain, when you compare an initial referral vs. the coupon app, it's fair to say that the initial referral has more impact. So maybe you want the initial referral to take most or all of the credit. But what about when there's no referral? Doesn't the coupon app deserve to be a part of the chain if it is ultimately driving positive return?

There's a very reasonable argument to be made a number of shopers wouldn't convert if they didn't feel like they were getting a "deal." So honey is undeniably aiding in the sale.

It's not "literally doing nothing" to compile and automatically apply/suggest coupon codes. That's literally doing something. Is it valuable? Objectively, yes, hence the millions upon millions of users.

Your statement is either hyperbolic or disingenuous: the very two things people are accusing honey of doing.

weren't they inserting themselves even in cases where there was no available coupon? Finding the user a deal isn't "doing literally nothing", and the argument for honey inserting itself in that case is at least not crazy. But as I understand it, they inserted themselves in every case even when they very literally did nothing (no deal, nothing).

I do agree that's shady, but there's a good chance at least some of those shoppers wouldn't have converted because they thought to themselves "I'll wait to make sure I can get the best deal" whereas someone with honey was in theory "sure" they were getting the best deal because no deals were available and pulled the trigger. Obviously in some cases that wasn't actually the case, but either way honey DID contribute to the sale.

My point is the issue is not honey. The problem is affiliate marketing (specifically last click attribution) as a whole. Don't hate the player. Hate the game.

The shopper feeling like they've gotten a deal is uncorrelated with whether Honey makes money from the merchants.

They also collect and sell data about all the purchases users make. I'd be startled if PayPal didn't use this data for selling customers on Braintree or selling ads. Also triple dipping and taking money from the affiliates (besides selling user data and extorting merchants) is downright greedy.

I think they refer to the fact that Honey also sets itself as affiliate when not finding any code.

That's how any fraud works - the mark feels like he is getting a good deal. And while the fact that there are millions of marks is an objective fact, it's not an objective indicator of the fraud being valuable to the marks.

I fundamentally disagree honey is/was fraudulent. They compiled and distributed coupon codes. The core funtionality exists. It just sucked -- I guess anyway, I was too suspicious and lazy to ever use it myself.

This is also not a contradiction. If I sell you a fake painting that looks the same, "the core visual functionality" exists

You're framing this in an extremely slanted way.

> So honey is undeniably aiding in the sale.

First of all, "undeniably" here is hyperbole. At best you could say "possibly, occasionally". You were already brought to site by a content creator, added the item to your cart, and are in the process of checking out. Why would a coupon code aggregator then deserve the commission for that sale?

> It's not "literally doing nothing" to compile and automatically apply/suggest coupon codes.

Even when they don't find a coupon code, they still take the commission for the sale. That is quite literally the definition of getting paid for doing nothing.

> Is it valuable? Objectively, yes, hence the millions upon millions of users.

Well, no. As the investigation revealed, Honey doesn't actually find any coupon code most of the time. In fact, this is intentional - they partner with retailers to limit the coupon codes they provide to shoppers. In other words they are intentionally providing negative value for the end user most of the time (when compared to searching the Web for a coupon code manually).

You clearly either know nothing about the investigation, or are a Honey employee.