Millions of Users Have Removed PayPal’s Honey Extension After Backlash

PayPal’s Honey extension, famous for finding coupon codes, has confronted criticism because of deceptive practices. A viral video by MegaLag, with more than 14 million views, uncovered how Honey manipulates affiliate links. The video uncovered that Honey takes credit for sales and hides better coupon choices. These disclosures prompted more than 3 million Chrome users uninstalling the extension.
Honey’s primary selling point is its capacity to find and apply the best promotion codes automatically. Notwithstanding, rather than benefiting directly from users, Honey makes money through affiliate programs where they are paid commissions for user referrals to online stores. This model is normal for many extensions of the browser, but the video revealed a rather sinister side of Honey’s work.
The most significant controversy revolves around Honey’s practice of replacing valid affiliate codes from other sources, such as YouTube creators or websites, with its own. This training, known as ‘last-click attribution’, empowers Honey to guarantee credit for the sales and hence take the reference charge regardless of whether it was another source that made the underlying acquaintance of the client with the retailer.
Besides, the video uncovered that Honey accomplices with retailers to cloud more advantageous discount codes, showing just those that favor the retailer or Honey itself. Various users have noticed that Honey frequently falls short of delivering significant discounts, which could be attributed to this approach.
Before the video being shared on December 21, Honey flaunted a user base surpassing 20 million. As per the latest information from The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, over 3 million users have removed Honey, leading to a decline in active users to 17 million in just one week.