Online shopping and finding discounts go hand in hand. I am sure we all have tried finding and applying coupons before checkout to make sure we get the best deal. Now, what if this whole process was automated? All you need to is click on the button, and let someone else find a coupon for you – and even apply it! That’s where Honey, a Chrome browser extension and app that finds coupons for best deals on the internet, comes into the picture.
PayPal buys a Chrome Extension & app for $4 billion
It had been one of the popular extensions among online shoppers and a user base of 17 million. While they have made $100 million in revenue, Paypal buying them for 4 billion dollars is staggering!
The extension, once installed, sits quietly in the background until you reach the page where you need to apply coupons. The moment you are there, it shows the available discount coupons. It can even find a better deal on the internet for the product you are planning to buy. It helps the user save a lot of money for sure, and with so much data on where the customer is going, and what they are buying, it’s a gold mine for anyone.
How did Honey make money?
Ryan Hudson and George Ruan, the founder of the platform, offered affiliate links when recommending a better deal of the products. They even signed up with e-commerce platforms, which helped them generate revenue.
While $4 billion sounds too high, as I said, there is a lot of data and buying habits of people that will now be available to PayPal. A lot of analysis can be done to figure out how they changed their decision when a better deal was shown. That’s what PayPal would be interested in, which itself deals with a lot of customers every day.
