Honey: The Promo Code Finding Google Chrome Extension
Hat tip to reader Robin CJ in the comments over here for pointing out the reddit thread on this.
This thing’s been making some news lately. Extensions are a little like apps for your browser. And it turns out that there’s one for Google Chrome that will search out promo codes for you while online shopping. After installation, a “find savings” button will show up during checkout on a bunch of web retailers. Click that button and Honey searches out and applies any codes that might work on your order.
Or at least it’s supposed to… More on that in a second.
First you have to install it. Pretty simple. You can either go to their website, or, go directly to the Google Chrome store (it’s free). A few clicks and your Chrome browser has it. But… and this is a big but for some, you have to grant it access to your browsing activity:
Assuming you’re okay with that (many will pull the ejection handles at this point), you click “add” and that’s it. From there you go shopping, and look for honey’s “find savings” button at checkout. Here’s what happened when honey was taken for a test drive yesterday, while Banana Republic was running a 30% off code BR30LIST:
Step 1: Put something in the cart. Went with a wool-blend crewneck I’ve had my eye on. Already on sale, so that extra 30% off will be nice. And who knows, maybe this honey extension will find a better code.
Step 2: Put in all the shipping/billing info, and get to the checkout screen. Magically, (and impressively) the honey button is right there. Click it, and honey goes to work…
Step 3: Let honey go to work. It does’t take more than a few seconds, and you can see something happening in the background on the page. Once it wraps up, you get a notification on whether or not it found any codes…
And the result: Well damn. Despite there being a clearly noticeable 30% off code on Banana Republic’s website, honey couldn’t find it. Tried it a few times, and each time honey came up empty. Just to be sure that this sweater wasn’t excluded from the sale, the old-fashioned way was tried:
And indeed… the code worked when manually applied. To be fair, honey was working just fine on Macys.com at the exact same time. But it stumbled at Banana Republic, and the button never showed up on JCrew.com.
They seem to be awfully new, so there’s going to be some kinks that’ll need to be worked out. And it’s a hell of an idea. But would you use it? Have you had success with it already? Leave it all below.