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Honey Browser Plugin

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The Honey Browser Controversy

Quick Introduction & Background:

  • CapitalOne faces a nearly identical lawsuit for the same practices. It appears as though this may be an “industry standard” predatory tactic that is more pervasive across coupon extensions en masse which may merit its own page. It may be the case that most coupon-searching browser extensions behave identically in this regard.


Honey is owned by PayPal and was recently featured in a few online investigations for their business practices.

It is a tool that you can install to your web browser (Google Chrome, FireFox, Edge, Safari etc.) and it states to work by “searching the web” to find you the best coupon code available for an item a person with the extension is shopping for online.

Honey states that it works by looking at the checkout page of an online store and searches the internet to find a coupon code for that website, finding and testing discount codes for your item, and states that if it can’t find one, it doesn’t exist on the internet.

However, Honey has been found to often not find the best coupons and deals for its users.

Victim Group 1: The Consumers

Honey promises consumers that they will “search the web” for the “best deals available”. What they actually do in practice is search their own databases (lists of coupons) for coupon codes. In some cases, Honey finds a code and tells the end-user. There is no guarantee, however, that Honey actually found that user the “best” discount code. On some occasions, Honey does manage to find discount codes that business owners never meant to make publicly available. More often than not, however, Honey will “search the web” and tell the end user ‘sorry, there are no eligible coupon codes we could find’. This level of inconsistency makes it hard to trust Honey to do the job they promise to do. Further searches for lawsuits with similar claims leads to a very similar suit against Capital One regarding similar practices, contributing to what may be a pattern among these "coupon finding" browser extensions.

Victim Group 2: Business Owners & Digital Storefronts

Additionally, PayPal offers business owners a program where they can partner with Honey, for a monthly fee (PayPal makes money). Business owners who choose to pay this “protection money” receive a guarantee that Honey will only show the discount codes the business wants them to show. There are documented instances of business owners finding what they thought were 'private' or 'one-time' discount codes being used by Honey users, building a strong incentive to "formally partner" with Honey and give PayPal their protection racket.

In a layman comparison, this is like somebody walking into a sporting goods store and saying, “Hey, if you pay me $19.00 a month, I’ll have someone make sure your customers only ever see sale tags that you want them to see. If you don’t, I’m going to have those same guys look through your entire inventory, all day, every day, and tell customers exactly how they can pay you as little as possible”.

Victim Group 3: Online Marketing Affiliates (often, "Content Creators")

(This is the rewording)

Affiliate marketing is a revenue-sharing model in which individuals or entities (affiliates) partner with companies to earn money for advertising goods and services. This is done through the use of personalized links to track which affiliate sent which customer to an online store. If the customer makes a purchase using an affiliate link, the affiliate whose link was used gets a commission on the sale.

Honey will sometimes disrupt this practice by replacing existing affiliate links with their own at the checkout page whenever a customer interacts with the extension in search of coupons. Even when Honey is unable to find a coupon for the customer, it will still frequently replace the affiliate link. When the customer makes their purchase, Honey takes credit for the sale and gets the commission.

The Honey extension was largely advertised via Content Creators on YouTube as well as other social media platforms. Affiliate marketing makes up a significant portion of a Content Creator's revenue. Most of the influencers who promoted Honey were unaware of its practices and thus unknowingly promoted a browser extension that poaches their affiliate revenue. Estimates of "stolen" revenue are upwards of 5 million USD. The discovery of Honey's practices has led to a class action lawsuit launched by Wendover Productions.

  • It is this practice in particular that has attracted legal attention, as several of Honey’s victims in this instance are/were attorneys who create content about legal controversies (such as LegalEagle and America’s Attorney). They have documented their view on the lawsuit here: https://honeylawsuit.com/

Sources/Links:

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