[zonkerdonker]

Extortion, essentially. Honey will actually give users the largest available discount if the retailer doesn't buy into the affiliate program (i.e. the retailer loses money). If they do agree, then the retailer can limit the coupons and discount code shown to customers through Honey.

[miki123211]

And there's presumably also a profit-sharing agreement.

E.G. if the retailer normally pays at 300 bps to their affiliates for a particular transaction, Honey may only get 100 or 50 bps.

It's a choice between e.g. Honey giving every customer of vendor X a voucher code from a particularly valuable influencer in X's niche, which gives 30% off on first orders, versus giving them a 20% discount and taking 1.5% for itself.

This is a great deal for the retailer, they go from -30% to -21.5%, it's a great deal for Honey because that kind of money on millions of transaction is a lot of money, and it's a great deal for users, as Honey wouldn't even exist without this scheme, and they'd get 0% off instead of 20.

[MostlyStable]

It is _maybe_ a great deal for the average consumer, who might not be putting any effort into finding deals. It's emphatically not a good deal for the (probably small) group of users who _would_ have put in the effort and found the _actual_ best deal, but trusted Honey who said they would provide the best deal and then knowingly gave worse deals (lied, potentially committed fraud?).

[raxxorraxor]

It also is a bad deal for those that just want to pay the normal price, because you pay for this financial overhead as well. At least in these cases the competition is often severe...

[echelon]

Sounds like the government needs to rip PayPal a new asshole.

[tyre]

Given that one of the most powerful people with the US Government right now is a member of a group called the PayPal Mafia

well

sigh

[droopyEyelids]

Does he still own paypal Stock? Seems unlikely. And he wants X to be a competitor!

[mrguyorama]

Uh Peter Thiel basically owns JD Vance. Musk wasn't meaningful in Paypal.

[93po]

Musk was the largest shareholder in PayPal and it likely wouldn't have been successful without him - not sure how you can argue that isn't meaningful

[tantalor]

Why stop there? Anybody making deals with Honey is co-conspirator under RICO.

[gruez]

Sounds like more of an issue for the consumer than the retailer? Suppose the best coupon for a retailer is 20% off, and Honey shows that to its users. Retailers want to stem that loss, so they bribe/pay Honey, maybe 5%, to post a 10% coupon in its place. That way the store loses 15% rather than 20%. That might be bad for the consumer, if they thought they were guaranteed the "best" deal, but I'm not sure how the store has any standing to sue. If so, that would put forums like slickdeals at risk.

[ryandrake]

It seems like the whole system would be so much better without coupons. Retailers should charge a single transparent price without having everyone have to go trawling around the Internet for coupon codes which may or may not work, and then being mad because some customers found bigger coupons, which you really didn't want them to find. And other customers using coupon finders who themselves are opaque and sometimes give out good coupons and sometimes don't, and then they use the whole coupon system to do other opaque things to skim money. Good grief! The whole system seems to be set up to reward 1. middlemen and 2. customers willing to deal with a ridiculous system for a discount.

[gruez]

>The whole system seems to be set up to reward [...] 2. customers willing to deal with a ridiculous system for a discount.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination#Coupons

It's unclear whether banning price discrimination as a whole is a good thing. Is it really a bad thing that people with more money pay more, and people with more time can get a discount?

[mrguyorama]

The entire point of doing price discrimination is so that you can keep a price high while tamping down any market pressure that would normally encourage you to lower your prices.

If McDonalds had to choose one price for an 8 piece nuggets, they would have to make a choice to either be ultra cheap, and anyone could happily afford those McDonalds nuggets like it was the 80s again, or they could choose to target up market, in which case they would compete with other expensive nuggets and some other business could take the market share for "extremely cheap nuggets"

Price discrimination distorts natural market forces that would otherwise drive competition, create opportunity, or "punish" hostile practices.

[stevage]

Yeah I think it's fine. I actually like that people who are short of money can put the effort in to knowing where and when all the sales are and live a bit cheaper, and I'm ok with subsidising them.

[a4isms]

Price discrimination isn't just "rich people pay more." It's also, "Our data shows that people in these demographic locations will pay more."

[gruez]

Nobody claimed it was somehow 100% accurate. After all, it's not like many stores ask for your tax returns before telling you the price (although they might very much would like to). The point holds even if it's approximately true.

[bigstrat2003]

> Is it really a bad thing that people with more money pay more...?

Yes, it is. It is blatantly unfair to charge different people different prices. You can illustrate this with a thought experiment: nobody would think it's ok if I charge Joe $5, but charge Bob $10 because I don't like him very much. Price discrimination is very much the same thing, just with the mechanism obfuscated and dressed up in pretty language so that it doesn't trip people's "this isn't right" detector as easily.

[rcxdude]

>nobody would think it's ok if I charge Joe $5, but charge Bob $10 because I don't like him very much

Are you sure? People often cheer on this kind of thing if they also think Bob's an asshole. (And there's no rule against it in most places unless you don't like Bob for fairly specific reasons)

[autoexec]

People will often cheer on all kinds of disgusting behavior including torture. Our laws should help to discourage the base instincts we haven't grown out of and make our lives more fair and reasonable than it would be if we left things to the whims of angry mobs, robber barons, and bigots

[gruez]

>Yes, it is. It is blatantly unfair to charge different people different prices. You can illustrate this with a thought experiment: nobody would think it's ok if I charge Joe $5, but charge Bob $10 because I don't like him very much.

This isn't as airtight proof of "unfair" as you think it is. Moreover this happens all the time without people being outraged. McDonalds might charge Joe $5, and Bob $10 for the same burger, because McDonalds likes Joe very much for using their app, so they send him offers.

Even if we do grant that charging people different prices is fundamentally "unfair", it leads to all sorts of strange conclusions. For instance if some retailer has some product on discount today only. Is that also "unfair"? I don't see how "buys a fridge on Wednesday rather than Thursday" is a morally justifiable reason to give different prices than say, being able to scout out a coupon or not. Should we ban time limited sales as well?

[autoexec]

There's a huge difference between a limited time sale that anyone can take advantage of vs charging higher prices to "the wrong sort of people" which is bigotry or "We'll use facial recognition to ID you, look up how much money you have, and charge a percentage of your income" which is where things are heading right now.

McDonalds gives people deals in their app because it tricks people into installing the app which they use to collect their customer's personal data (even when they aren't using the app) which they can sell or exploit in any way they see fit. It's a terrible deal for the customer, but they don't know any better because they don't get to see how that data is used against them.

Price discrimination leads to exploitation and enables bigotry. We've been being conditioned to accept it because ultimately companies want to abuse it to make more money at your expense. The only thing standing in their way is that most people understand that discriminatory pricing is unfair and dangerous https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41272-019-00224-3

[miki123211]

> The whole system seems to be set up to reward [...] customers willing to deal with a ridiculous system for a discount.

That's not all of what coupons are for.

They're also a form of advertising. If you give them out to an influencer in your niche who can bring you great customers, you can make a lot of extra profits.

Imagine you're making an app for managing hair dressing salons. If there's a particular Youtuber popular among hair dressing salon managers, you can do a deal with them where their viewers get 20% off on the first year of their subscription to your app, and the influencer gets an extra 3% of that revenue.

You do this because you expect that people watching that channel are already hair dressing salon managers, and hence are very likely to become big spenders with your company once they start using your services. It's a great deal for everyone.

Honey turns that on its head by indiscriminately offering that influencer's valuable voucher code to everyone, reglardless of whether they've seen any of their videos.

[elevatedastalt]

I think it's fine. For things that aren't too expensive where I am fortunate enough to not have to be price-sensitive, I don't bother with coupons beyond a cursory Google search.

But not everyone is equally fortunate, and for some people the time investment to find the right coupon might be what makes them able to afford a necessity.

[Spivak]

> Retailers should charge a single transparent price without having everyone have to go trawling around the Internet for coupon codes which may or may not work.

Then you miss the point of the coupon codes, they're for measuring ad effectiveness. The discount is the incentive for the customer to reveal to the business where they learned about the product and who was responsible for the sale.

[umbra07]

Better for you, worse for me.

[MisterSandman]

I may be an idiot - wouldn’t it be cheaper to get rid of the 20% coupon code?

And if the retailer REALLY wants to keep the 20% discount for a particular use-case, make it a targeted discount for certain user accounts?

[kin]

This is not true. In the affiliate marketing space, Honey won many awards for being great business partners. Yes, there are examples of retailers being impacted when Honey picked up on a coupon that was not supposed to be public, but Honey always cooperated at removing such codes whether you partnered with them or not.

[luckylion]

Great business partner providing ... what value?

They're not guiding the user to shop a or shop b, they're

- redirecting the attribution away from the actual affiliate (could hurt shops because their affiliates become unhappy and advertise their competitors)

- automatically applying coupons that decrease the shop's margin.

How are they "great business partners"?

[kin]

The article I linked supports this but to put it simply, Honey delivers a return on ad spend. Your first point is true, but Honey and other extensions practice "stand down" where if detected, they'll not affiliate tag if there's one already there. It's not a perfect system and there are edge cases to prove the system is not perfect. It's ultimately up to the retailer to decide whether or not to partner with Honey. The data in the report shows that users with Honey have lower cart abandonment and higher purchase rate. Looking at the numbers, retailers like these two things so they choose to partner. Automatically applying coupons can decrease margin, but why have coupons at all? Retailers take this into account when putting out coupons. Users who use Honey are typically users who would look for a coupon elsewhere. Retailers would rather the user not leave their website. Honey keeps users on the checkout page.

In terms of being "great business partners". The affiliate space like other industries requires a team of people on the retailer side and Honey's side talking to each other and establishing a relationship. Here is a random article I just Google'd that sheds a bit of light about that relationship. https://www.advertisepurple.com/affiliate-spotlight-a-conver...

[bigbuppo]

Remember how NFTs just weren't a thing and then someone got a well-placed article talking about NFTs and all of a sudden they "hot" even though it was just a sham the whole way, before and after "I been hacked. all my apes gone. this just sold please help me"?

Influence can be bought on the cheap. MrBeast says use Honey, you use Honey. Are you going to not partner with the business that is smart enough to partner with MrBeast?

[artursapek]

Retailers don’t have to honor discounts, nobody is forcing them to.

[dspillett]

> nobody is forcing them to

Other than fear of the court of public opinion, possibly stoked by one or more of their competitors, if they don't…

[buzzerbetrayed]

Why do retailers offer those discounts then? Why not deactivate them instead of allowing honey to give them to their users? Am I misunderstanding what honey does?

[traes]

That would mean deactivating all discounts. Honey actively scrapes for them, so as soon as a discount is available on the internet it will find it. Not an impossible solution, but not a popular one.

You could probably be clever and come up with a more complicated discount scheme that's not so easy for Honey to take advantage of, but that adds complexity for users as well.

[adrr]

You can do unique discount codes that are one time use or maybe up to 5 times. Common especially if you want tracking like you send out mailers or emails.

[arkh]

As a not an American, I can't fathom the love for coupon you all have.

Shit system, shit value for the client, and still it looks like some people would kill for a 5% one-time discount on anything.

[dspillett]

> I can't fathom the love for coupon you all have.

I think for some it taps into the same reward neurons as winning £10 on a lottery after paying £1 in week-in-week-out for years. It feels like a win, and that for many overrides any desire to properly analyse the matter (did I actually save, with the coupon, or save 5% on something that has been marked up 20%? (or buy something I didn't really want at all?!)). Same with BlackFriday, many of Amazon's “prime day” offers, and so forth.

[Also not American, I'm a UKian/ex-EUian, it is not uncommon to see the same here, just not in the big way some Americans tend to go with almost anything]

[blitzar]

5% one-time discount on something that has been marked up by 25%.

People will buy a thing that is 90% off reduced from $99 in preference to buying the identical thing for $5 with no discount.