affiliate links and the Honey plugin on Zazzle

[steveareno225]

There has been a lot of talk about the Honey plugin "switch" affiliate cookies.  I never trusted Honey so I did install Honey, I do NOT wish agree to the Honey TOS to do testing. Does any one know what  is Honey doing on Zazzle. Is Honey "switching" affiliate cookies on Zazzle

Thank You

[SimplyDesigned]

Honey can only control what Honey does, sharing your product on twitter with your Zazzle referral code has nothing to do with Honey. If someone uses Honey, its because Honey found a coupon code like ZAZ50 or something. It has nothing to do with you and your affiliate referral code here on Zazzle. (Granted ANY time someone used a % off coupon code it does pay designers less than their set royalty, that's not because of Honey) People that are dropping affiliate links TO download Honey are having their tracking code swapped out with one from Honey so the creator isn't getting their correct split.

To answer you about "testing" I wouldn't even bother, there's no way of using ANY program (unless its open source maybe) without accepting ToS/EULA's. There's a plethora of creators that have already done the testing and shared their results in YT videos. I refuse to put Honey on my computer because "if its too good to be true, it probably is". When Honey first dropped years ago I thought it was bad then, glad to have stuck with it.

[tanyadraws]

I was wondering if anyone was discussing this. I have not tested it myself (don't want to get the honey extension), but from what I've heard, Honey strips affiliate codes on websites & replaces with their own, regardless of whether they are able to find a coupon code or not. So if someone runs the Honey extension on Zazzle before checkout and "finds" no codes, they were still adding their referral code to the end of links & stripping the original referral code. 

What I am unsure of is if they do this for ALL links and just blanket add honey UTM tracking link or referral code at the end, or if they have a list of some URLs they do this for.

I'd be curious to know if this is a blanket thing that they do. I have a feeling its something where affiliates would have been impacted on many different sites, regardless of whether the website was officially working with Honey or not - so it is probably largely out of Zazzle's control. 

[ColsCreations]

MegaLags video that blew all this up two weeks ago.

Honey extension loses 3 million Chrome users after being exposed for shady tactics

YouTuber LegalEagle sues PayPal over ‘sleeping leech’ Honey extension

From the way I understand it, Honey was exploiting the standard last-click attribution model (an advertising attribution system where the final touchpoint gets all the credit for a purchase). With the extension active and clicking it while on a site to see if any discounts are available, they were covertly re-directing, with own affiliate code, so as to be the last-click. But, as we all know. Zazzle does not operate on this last-click premise. Instead, once a cookie is set there are very specific timing rules as to when it can be overridden by a new one. [Detailed post by Mark, Feb 2022.]

So thanks to Zazzle's advanced cookie program (which we often like to complain about, it's confusing), it's my belief that the Honey extension has/had little to no effect on Zazzle affiliate links. I did an actual test for the Rakuten extension when that came up [see post here] and that did not steal the referral. I believe it would be the same for the Honey extension, since as said, Zazzle doesn't operate on the last-click attribution approach. But, being one who doesn't like to leave things that are easily figure-outable to guessing, I'll test it out later.