121–130 of 336 posts
Have a friend high up at one of the “Big 3” in this space. The entire business model is predicated on injecting themselves as the last click for attribution even when they weren’t remotely responsible for the conversion. Cool business, but can’t keep going on forever without someone catching on.
But despite a lot of coverage they've only lost about 1/5 of their user base.
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Retailmenot.com
I want to like RetailMeNot but every time I try it, I very seldom come across functioning coupon codes. I don't understand what incentivizes people to submit bogus codes.
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I'm seaching for 'equal' on the home page and finding no results, nor for 'feeds'. Could you help me identify those locations? It's always confusing to me when I go to their home page and would appreciate it. I think the equal coverage might be what I'm actually looking for.
I think they're referring to https://ground.news/blindspot
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I remember when this was called cookie stuffing, and eBay even sent a guy to jail for doing it with their affiliate program. That’s the same eBay that owned PayPal, which now owns Honey…
Interesting, I found an article about it: https://www.businessinsider.com/shawn-hogan-sentenced-in-eba...
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A significant number of users will spend more if they think they're getting a deal. Without a deal, even a fake one, users will go somewhere else or spend less. Or, if they think they're saving 15% on one thing, they'll justify spending 40% more, to get more out of that 15% discount. This is what happened when Ron Johnson tried to rebrand JC Penny. JC Penny customers were used to "deals" through coupons. He changed t…
Sounds like your ire should be directed at the retailers who created the coupons in the first place, not Honey for letting people know they exist.
Honey gets additional ire, for what they did beyond that. Coupons are manipulative, but Honey was also lying to pretty much everyone involved in the transactions, as well as their advertising partners.
What is the alternative? Is there an open source version that is community curated?
To be honest? The majority of discount culture is a disgusting trap where retailers inflate default MSRPs and manipulate price histories so they can put big percent signs on the products to bring them down to normal and FOMO/gouge anyone with time constraints. T-shirts and vacuums aren't perishable. Make everything cheaper all the time, adjust the cost to reflect actual supply/demand, and stop the wiggling banners an…
Ahh, so you're JC Penney:
https://www.choicehacking.com/2022/11/24/the-psychological-f...
sadly, in some ways engaged customers want to feel like their efforts pay off in "smarter" deals. and that mind game overcomes any genuine attempts to lay everything up front.
What is the alternative? Is there an open source version that is community curated?
We track sales from retailers, and use historic sales information to recommend if the sale is good or not (ex some retailers always have XX% off, so you only want to jump on sales that are better than that). In addition, we'll let you sign up for digest alerts, so ideally you get 1 notification a day with all the good sales across all the brands you shop at, rather than hundreds of spammy marketing emails a day.
We don't clickjack affiliate links like Honey, and don't have deals with retailers incentivizing us to promote deals that are worse for the consumer.
Check us out at https://getketch.ai, or start browsing brands at https://members.getketch.ai/brands to get a feel for the product if you're interested
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Sounds like more of an issue for the consumer than the retailer? Suppose the best coupon for a retailer is 20% off, and Honey shows that to its users. Retailers want to stem that loss, so they bribe/pay Honey, maybe 5%, to post a 10% coupon in its place. That way the store loses 15% rather than 20%. That might be bad for the consumer, if they thought they were guaranteed the "best" deal, but I'm not sure how the stor…
It seems like the whole system would be so much better without coupons. Retailers should charge a single transparent price without having everyone have to go trawling around the Internet for coupon codes which may or may not work, and then being mad because some customers found bigger coupons, which you really didn't want them to find. And other customers using coupon finders who themselves are opaque and sometimes g…
Then you miss the point of the coupon codes, they're for measuring ad effectiveness. The discount is the incentive for the customer to reveal to the business where they learned about the product and who was responsible for the sale.
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Sounds like more of an issue for the consumer than the retailer? Suppose the best coupon for a retailer is 20% off, and Honey shows that to its users. Retailers want to stem that loss, so they bribe/pay Honey, maybe 5%, to post a 10% coupon in its place. That way the store loses 15% rather than 20%. That might be bad for the consumer, if they thought they were guaranteed the "best" deal, but I'm not sure how the stor…
It seems like the whole system would be so much better without coupons. Retailers should charge a single transparent price without having everyone have to go trawling around the Internet for coupon codes which may or may not work, and then being mad because some customers found bigger coupons, which you really didn't want them to find. And other customers using coupon finders who themselves are opaque and sometimes g…
But not everyone is equally fortunate, and for some people the time investment to find the right coupon might be what makes them able to afford a necessity.
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Those I have less of a problem with. What I actually have a problem with is the supplement sales, VPN sales, and gambling sales. "Here's a magic multivitamin that will make you feel 1000% better!". "You are so unsafe by not using a VPN, here use our service which also gets to peak at everything you send through it". "Wanna bet on this Ping-Pong championship? Well, grab some crypto and go to this 'not legal in the US…
What's wrong with VPNs? Seems like the tamest thing to sell in terms of ethical impact. any security middleman can be skewed negatively if you phrase it as "they get to peek at everything". That's what a security app needs to properly protect you, and why these apps live and die on credibility (see: Crowdstrike). Fortunately none of the youtubers I watched ever went full dark horse and pawned off gambling and scams,…
Well, for starters the actual "security" that is often promised from these services is WAY overblown. You are already very secure browsing the internet using https. The TLS standard grants a huge amount of security that doesn't allow for snooping from a MITM.
So, when they start saying "everyone needs to do this to be safe". That's simply a boldface lie.
Your security when going through a VPN is from using https. If you are unfortunate and get a less than scrupulous VPN you might end up with them adding themselves as CAs (yes, some VPNs do that). That allows them to crack and access data within the secure stream.
Most of these VPN services are also trying to get you to do DNS with their DNS servers. Again, a major potential privacy leak problem.
> That's what a security app needs to properly protect you
VPNs aren't anti-virus software and any VPN selling that should be EXTREMELY mistrusted. You are right, they can only provide that sort of service by decrypting your secure payloads. That is where all the scamminess comes into play.
Certainly not every VPN service is bad, but I'd have an inherent mistrust in one that has both a cheap fee and the seemingly endless budget to advertise everywhere on youtube. They are getting money from somewhere and I doubt it's from grandmas signing up for the service.