It’s getting a lot of attention from online bargain shoppers but can you believe the hype? We’re talking, of course, about the Honey browser extension.

Today, we’ll strive to answer that question for you with an honest review of what Honey can do, what we liked about it, where we felt it could use some improvement and our final verdict on this extension.

Let’s see what all the fuss is about with the Honey Browser extension!

What Is Honey?

Honey is a browser extension that is completely free and is designed to help you find online bargains.

Promising a saving on average of 17.92%, Honey works currently with more than 40,000 online retailers to find you the lowest price on the items or services which you are looking to purchase.

Examples of prominent online sales venues include:

• Amazon
• Target
• Pizza Hut
• Sephora
• Nike
• Macy’s
• Stubhub

These are just a few examples but you get the idea. They’ve laid out a large, foundational network of websites to help to ensure that you get the best deals on products with a little help from Honey.

They can even help you to get travel deals, so on the surface, it looks like this little extension packs quite a punch—more from this at Millennial Money.

Honey is designed to work on several popular browsers as well, so you can install it on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, and Opera. So, what is the experience like? Let’s take a closer look.

How Does Honey work?

The primary features that you’ll use Honey for play out like this. First, the main thing that you’ll notice is that Honey runs in the background and the little yellow ‘Honey-button’ icon will flash green to get your attention when it finds a deal on something that you are looking at.

This might raise privacy concerns, but the folks at Honey advise on their site that all information from its users shall remain private.

Now, once you see that green flashing, you can click on the Honey button and it will give you a list of deals on your item which you can select from.

Should you select one and go ahead with your purchase, you also earn ‘gold points’ as an incentive and these can be turned into gift cards for use with participating sellers on the Honey network.

Honey also provides a feed that can show you the top stores that happen to be trending at the moment. In case you feel like seeing what deals stores are offering.

Finally, there is a nifty little feature called Honey Droplist which lets you add items that you are looking to buy so that Honey can watch them for as many days as you specify and whenever you access it you can see the current lowest price of the item.

It’s a cute little extension, we have to say, so let’s push forward and we’ll give you our thoughts based on our actual shopping experiences.

Pros of Honey

Shopping on Amazon, we were able to save on a few items with Honey running in the background. Selecting an item for a closer look got the Honey icon flashing and we were able to find better deals. The price alert seems to work as well.

Over a week of monitoring a handful of items, Honey successfully performed by showing us when any of them dropped in price, listing out the sellers that had the items available at discount and ready to purchase.

Cons of Honey

It may not be Honey’s fault or it might just be that the app is still young, but the experience with Amazon was very hit or miss. Online coupons are available from so many sources and finding the ones that are legit and not-expired is hard enough for a human being armed with Google.

We’re simply not so sure that Honey’s algorithms have quite gotten to the point where the extension will be more than casually useful.

Final Verdict

Honey is an enterprising idea and we will certainly be watching the extension for the next few months to see how it improves.

New vendors are being added to their network all the time, so this is promising, but currently the extension is not consistent enough to see more than casual use.

If you’d like to use Honey, consider installing an additional browser where you can add the extension and use it just for Honey.

We say this because the extension certainly can save you money but as it doesn’t always do so you might reserve ‘Honey searches’ for more expensive items where using the extension might be more worth your time.

The final verdict… We uninstalled the Honey extension but we’re keeping a hopeful eye on them for the future!

Image by GrandAve via Shutterstock.com