Home > News

That Honey Deal You Found May Not Be as Good as You Think

By Laura Tucker
Honey Deal Scam Featured

Who doesn’t like a good deal, especially during the holidays and when it seems everything is costing so much more? Honey is known for finding you the best deal possible on a desired product. However, a YouTuber published a video over the weekend stating that Honey is a scam, is responsible for stealing from influencers, and that it promotes its own coupons over better deals.

YouTuber Blows Up Honey Extension

The time it takes to find good deals can be lengthy, but the Honey browser extension can reduce that time significantly. Since you’re trying to save time by using it, you’re unlikely to check to be sure it’s the best deal. But maybe you should be – or just not use it at all.

Honey Deals Easier Than Scrolling

A YouTuber claims that while Honey’s job is to interrupt your deal search to offer you coupon codes while you’re shopping, it’s known to not find codes. It’s also known for offering you a Honey deal at the time you’re searching. While Honey claims it will “find every working promo code on the Internet,” the YouTuber claims it ignores good deals and subs in deals from Honey’s partnerships that are actually lesser deals.

Even more disturbing, the YouTuber claims that the Honey browser extension has been stealing money from the influencers who are paid to promote it. While influencers have affiliate links that are supposed to pay them if you click on the link, Honey puts its own tracking link in instead – even if it doesn’t find you a coupon code. It gets the affiliate credit for the sale instead of the influencer.

FYI: check out these other tricks online sellers use to manipulate the sales process.

Reactions to YouTuber’s Claims

Honey is a product of PayPal. The VP of PayPal’s corporate communications, Josh Criscoe, said that industry rules and practices are followed with the Honey business. He added that those rules and practices include last-click attribution, which is a model that has all the credit for that clicked link going to the company responsible for the last click before the sale.

Honey Deals Coupons

In fact, a tweet from 2021 suggested that if you open the Honey discount code in a different browser, you can get the affiliate click instead of Honey. Additionally, Linus Tech Tips reportedly stopped using Honey as a sponsor, as it didn’t agree with how it conducted its business with affiliates.

There are many affiliates who may have been affected. There are 1,000 YouTube channels that recommend Honey in nearly 5,000 videos. And now those influencers are questioning their affiliation with Honey – or at least they should be. And you may want to consider a different browser extension to save money.

If you’re on the lookout for more deals, check out the daily deals at Make Tech Easier, such as this one on a large smart TV.

All screenshots and images by Laura Tucker.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.
In October 2002, a Russian scientist named Dimitri Malashenkov stood up at a space conference in Houston and quietly explained that the dog Laika, whom the Soviet Union had publicly mourned as a heroic week-long orbiter in 1957, had actually died of heat and panic within about five hours of launch.