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.
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.
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...
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?
