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Honey Introduces A Universal Cart For Online Shoppers ... - TechCrunch

Honey, the useful web browser add-on which automatically finds and applies promo codes to your orders when shopping online, is today launching a new version of its service (aka "Honey 2.0") that introduces a universal shopping cart. The feature is designed to allow consumers to buy from multiple stores in one online shopping session, then use your saved billing and shipping information to complete the checkout process in seconds.

Founded in late 2012, Honey's goal has been to simplify online shopping – an activity that still requires tedious form-filling, manual entry of payment information, and quite a bit of online research in order to find the best prices or locate available promo codes (which only sometimes work!) in order to receive a discount on your purchases.

With Honey installed, online shoppers previously had been presented with an additional button on the checkout screen of their favorite stores. When clicked, Honey would scour the web for available promo codes, and try them all until it finds those that work and provide the best deal.

I've personally used Honey since shortly after its debut, finding savings on everything from shoes to pizza to photo prints to electronics and more. It's sort of a no-brainer.

Co-founders Ryan Hudson and George Ruan knew they had a hit on their hands after launch, when one early user hired to help bug test liked the product so much, he posted it to Reddit, where Honey quickly went viral. By spring 2013, Honey reached over 200,000 users and raised a small seed round. Today, Ruan says Honey has grown to 900,000 users organically.

Now comes the second phase on the startup's roadmap: the universal shopping cart.

With the update, shoppers who click on the Honey browser button while on a product page will see an "Add To Cart" button slide in from the right side of the screen. You'll then click this button to add your item to Honey's universal shopping cart, and can then continue to shop online at that store or others, repeating the same process when you find items you want to buy.

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When you're ready to actually pay, you click "View Cart" and Honey will launch a small window that appears over top of the website you're currently visiting. It then proceeds to find the best promo code or other savings for all your saved items, and fills out the retailers' checkout forms programmatically. You can save your checkout information in Honey once, and it can be used on any store – even those you've never shopped on before, explains Ruan.

Honey also retrieves the shipping information for each store, so you know when your products will arrive. Meanwhile, from the merchant's perspective, it's as if you shopped on their site directly, meaning Honey won't interfere with reward points, returns, warranties or other concerns.

Honey works across over 100 stores, while the auto-couponing feature is rolling out to select stores to start, and will reach all Honey's supported stores soon.

"Everything is exactly the same as if you pulled out your credit card and went through the checkout process manually," says Ruan. "We are simply automating the entire check out flow in the same way we've automated the coupon entry process," he adds.

With the update, Honey now better competes with newer rival, Y Combinator-backed Zinc, whose advantage for consumers is a centralized dashboard for order management, as well as the option to pay with other means the retailer might not natively support, like bitcoin or Dwolla, for example.

Ruan says that Honey users today are viewing 72 million product pages every month and spending over $40 million. The service is saving those users roughly $1 million every month, and has saved close to $9 million to date.

To use Honey 2.0, you'll need to visit the Honey website and install the browser add-on. (Remove the old version first, if you're already a user). I also found you also needed to relaunch the browser post-installation to see the button appear.

But again, it's kind of a no-brainer.

Sarah has worked as a reporter for TechCrunch since August 2011. She joined the company after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to her work as a reporter, Sarah worked in I.T. Across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software.

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Honey Automatically Searches For And Applies Coupon Codes ... - Lifehacker

Chrome: Many of you probably search for coupons on sites like RetailMeNot when you shop online, but free extension Honey takes it to the next level: With one click, it will search for coupon codes for you, and automatically apply any that work to your checkout cart.

Honey works with over 100 stores, adding a new button to your checkout page that does all the work for you—searching and applying coupon codes—without you having to lift a finger. What more could you ask for? Check out the video above to see it in action, or try it out by installing it at the link below.

What do you think so far?

HoneyChrome Web Store via Maximum PC

Digital Coupon Services Like Honey Offer Retailers Several Major ...

When PayPal spent $4 billion on automated coupon-finding service Honey Science Corp in late November 2019, it was the payment giant's largest-ever acquisition — and an eye-watering amount for the then seven-year-old startup. But it's likely to prove a strategic bargain, at least over the long term.

Honey acts like a discount ray gun for online shopping. Install its browser button or mobile app and it will automatically search for coupon codes at checkout, an effortless way for shoppers to save money wherever they do their browsing. 

The company had clear consumer appeal: Since its founding in 2012, Honey claimed 17 million monthly active users and partnerships with 30,000 online retailers, becoming a mainstay of online shopping for millennials and Gen X. 

It might sound counterintuitive, but many online stores and retailers have embraced, rather than been turned off by, services like Honey that allow buyers to more easily find discounts.

Benefits include lead generation and conversion

Ken Fenyo, president of research and advisory at Coresight, a firm that specializes in retail consulting, and a former senior executive at Kroger who helped to run its loyalty program, said that companies work with discount aggregators to help with lead generation: Issue coupons, they reason, and Honey will help retailers find consumers. For partners like J. Crew or Target, the cost is minimal — a few cents in affiliate commissions for every coupon redeemed is a bargain for brands keen to stand out in a crowded online marketplace.

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"We find, whenever we do research, that the most important thing is the price, and whether there's a deal or discount to be had on it," Fenyo told Insider.

There's pragmatism underpinning the decision, too. "Ultimately, it's a question of ROI — are the incremental sales greater than the cost of acquiring the customer via the discount?" he said. In as competitive a retail landscape as today, the answer is almost always yes.

Coupon aggregators are also vital in conversion, making sure that browsers become buyers. Online retailers have long struggled with the problem of cart abandonment, when items are left in an online basket before the transaction completes. Some studies put the overall rate as high as 79% of all online transactions. With a service like Honey primed to trigger automatically at that key moment for completing a transaction, it's likely to prevent many buyers from last-minute remorse. 

Control is an unlikely third tenet underpinning retailers' enthusiasm to work with companies dedicated to reducing their margins. Jon Vincent is the founder of Early Black Friday, a website that consolidates ads and information on Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. He noted that partnering with these automated discount-finding firms offers retailers more control than when customers simply Google the words "coupon code."  

Say a company like J. Crew wants to offer two discounts, 10% off for all but 20% off for select customers. It could partner with discount providers to prioritize that lower promo in its automated searches, likely shortcutting buyers from digging too deeply via an independent search. That 20% off coupon code could still leak out, he acknowledged, "But realistically, if none of the big coupon websites or browser extensions includes that coupon, most people will not use it," he said.

Surprisingly, customer data is an ancillary, rather than a core, benefit. Coresight's Fenyo said that unless a program is a wholly-owned CRM system, much of what they receive is vague and far from actionable.

Often the partnership between discount providers and the stores is brokered by a middleman, Vincent said. Companies like Commission Junction and Impact act as affiliate tracking firms and will reach out to merchants and sites like Honey to suggest that a partnership would be mutually lucrative. Retailers will then review potential partners and accept them into their affiliate program with a standard term of service that gives them visibility and control. Retailers prioritize the sites which provide the most traffic, as volume is key.

"Larger sites [like Honey] do additional promotion of the retailer to help drive sales, so that turns out to be a win-win for them both," Vincent said.

Desktop-first systems face an uncertain future

Honey has an Achilles heel: It was developed as a desktop-first product, and only introduced a smartphone app for mobile shopping in February 2019. It was a bafflingly sluggish strategy, given that mobile shopping is predicted to account for the majority of sales, at 54%, this year and continue to rise. 

"People think there is a goldmine of data and a purchase graph which is extractable from these things," Forrester analyst Sucharita Kodali said of apps like Honey, noting that's rarely the case. "So I think they do hit walls. It's not that hard to shop online and get good deals even without using these sites." 

Fenyo said he expects that a new generation of mobile-first loyalty and discount apps will likely displace desktop specialists like Honey, all of which rely on a search component that's harder to replicate in a mobile-first experience. Look, instead, to a new generation of deal-hunting startups that are smartphone native, such as Drop, offers points that convert to cash on specific deals — a mattress from Casper, say, or dinner delivered by DoorDash.

"Web-based couponing is for the prior generation," Fenyo said. "These apps were clearly built from the ground up by millennials, for millennials. That's their secret."

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