Honey Sued Again for Cookie Stuffing

Here is the video announcing the class action lawsuit and is rather long, but it goes through tons of information. The interesting part of this lawsuit is the focus on consumer harm. It is a long video but I highly recommend if you are interested in this whole Honey situation that you watch it.

It will be interesting to see if this lawsuit and LegalEagle’s get combined, but they appear to be taking different approaches so they might both move forward.

The most surprising thing about Honey to begin with, is how they have gotten away with this plan to cookie stuff for so long. The majority of affiliate programs do not allow this type of behaviour and often drop affiliates that are clearly breaking affiliate program rules. I have been dropped from affiliate programs for much smaller issues that were not even intentional, let along stealing and cookie stuffing.

Coupons are a HUGE business on the Internet and I am sure that coupon sites must have seen a drop in sales and affiliate commissions. Honey found a way to out cookie stuff other coupon sites by using an extension. Note, that many coupon websites also have a browser extensions, that possibly do the same thing that Honey does, they just don’t have the same reach or stores supported.

Perhaps the best thing that could come from these lawsuits against Honey would be Internet sales moving away from the last click affiliate model. Moving to attribution based on the actual coupon codes, so coupon sites and Honey can’t steal codes and affiliate commissions on the last click model.