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Honey browser plugin controversy

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Background:[edit | edit source]

  • Capital One 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, which was recently featured in a few online investigations for its business practices. It is a tool that you can install in your web browser (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Safari, etc.), and it claims to work by “searching the web” to find its user the best coupon code available for an item the user is shopping for online.

Honey states that it works by looking at the checkout page of an online store and searching the internet to find a coupon code for that website, finding and testing discount codes for your item. The implication is that if it is unable to find a better coupon code, one does not exist. Honey, however, has been found to often not find the best coupons and deals for its users.

Victim group 1: consumers[edit | edit source]

Honey promises consumers that it will “search the web” for the “best deals available”. What it actually does in practice is search its own databases (a list 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 and digital storefronts[edit | edit source]

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 they want it 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 its protection racket.

In a layman comparison, this is like somebody walking into a sporting-goods store and saying, “Hey, if you pay me $19 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 and ontent creators[edit | edit source]

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 customers to an online store. If a customer makes a purchase using an affiliate link, the affiliate whose link was used gets a commission on the sale.

Honey disrupts this practice by replacing an existing affiliate link with their own on the checkout page, whenever a customer interacts with the extension in search of coupons. It does this even when it is unable to find a coupon for the customer. When the customer makes their purchase, Honey takes credit for the sale and gets the commission.

The Honey extension was largely advertised by content creators on YouTube as well as other social-media platforms. Affiliate marketing can make 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 or 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:[edit | edit source]

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