If you’ve seen the “Honey Influencer scam” incident, you probably have a lot of questions and concerns about whether it will affect your affiliate partnerships. Whether you’re an advertiser or an affiliate partner in our network, you’ve come to the right place for answers! First of all, it should be said that this only affects advertisers who work with the Honey browser extension in CJ, and secondly, the end customer must have this browser extension installed. The cause of action is thus mainly in the United States and Western Europe. At the same time, CJ has options and solutions to help protect the interests of advertisers and all types of partners.
If you don’t understand the cause exactly, let’s first explain how the topic has shaken e-commerce marketing in the United States. Youtuber and influencer MegaLag, in his video titled “Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam,” accused a partner promoting through a browser extension of “stealing” commissions from influencers. Published in the second half of December 2024, the video quickly found its way not only to marketers but also to a wider audience, including end customers.
How Honey and other extensions work
Let’s look at the whole process from the perspective of an e-commerce customer who is shopping online and logically wants to get a discount. So he installs a browser extension that offers him a discount coupon when he completes his purchase. From the advertiser’s perspective, this is a legitimate tool to increase the chances of conversion for that customer. The customer completes the purchase and the advertiser pays a commission to the affiliate, which is paid on the basis of the affiliate’s last-click attribution.
This is where the problem arises, which MegaLag came up with and outraged other influencers in the United States. This is because there is rarely only one affiliate link or marketing channel in the attribution path. So it all depends on the advertiser’s strategy towards affiliates – whether influencers, bloggers or cashbacks and browser extensions like Honey. This is because the latter group of partners are more often at the end of the customer journey leading to conversion, and therefore in most cases they will take the commission. Advertisers knew about the way Honey promotes and knowingly partnered with it.
And if some of the practices and methods of earning commissions were not clean after all (and the allegations from the video are proven), it is worth mentioning that CJ.com has options and tools to protect the interests of all advertisers and partners (including influencers and legitimate partners promoting through browser extensions) compared to competing affiliate networks. CJ.com’s strategy, transparency, and technology allows it to set up affiliate collaborations correctly to the satisfaction of the advertiser and all types of partners.
Whether you are an advertiser or a partner, concerns aside
Our affiliate network offers a number of ways to work with multiple affiliate links in the attribution path and how to reward partners fairly. Check out the advice and tips from the VIVnetworks editorial team:
For advertisers:
- Follow the Affiliate Customer Journey report to see when and how your partners enter the attribution journey
- Set up collaborations however you see fit: if another affiliate link is in the attribution path, you can allocate the commission to them at the expense of the browser extension partner
- Use clickless tracking, in which the affiliate whose coupon was used in the purchase gets the commission. Then you just need to properly evaluate which affiliate to give it to
- Set up your commission system according to predefined conditions (coupon used, number of affiliates in the path, cart size, etc.)
For affiliates/influencers:
- Get informed and choose your advertisers also according to their approach to browser extensions. And if they partner with them, find out if they have a program set up to account for affiliate influence throughout the attribution journey
- Try to arrange coupon collaborations. With an exclusive coupon and clickless tracking feature, you’ll get 100 % of orders where “your” discount coupon is redeemed
