Cashback and Deal Sites Can Overwrite an Influencer's Tracking Cookie

How it actually happens

A customer clicks an influencer's tracking link, adds the product to the cart, but doesn't complete the purchase right away. Before checking out, the customer instead visits a cashback or deal site — a well-known category that includes international services like Rakuten or TopCashback, or a local voucher-code site — looking for a code or a cashback reward. The deal site has its own affiliate link to the same store, and when the customer clicks through from there, the deal site sets its own tracking cookie in the browser. Under ordinary last-click attribution, as described in how influencer tracking actually works, it's typically the most recently set valid cookie that gets the commission on the sale — not necessarily the influencer who originally created interest in the product.

That makes the situation structurally related to when two creator links both claim the same sale, with one key difference: here, one of the two parties isn't a creator at all, but a third-party service the customer sought out independently, typically late in the purchase journey, often right at checkout. It also isn't the same as self-referral affiliate fraud — no one is breaking a rule by simply using a deal site; the issue is how the network's own attribution hierarchy handles two genuine, different partners' clicks touching the same customer journey.

Not every cashback or deal site is treated the same: Awin's own cookie hierarchy

How real the risk actually is depends on which cookie status the network itself has assigned the deal site — not on whether it's labelled "cashback" or "voucher." Awin's own documentation on cookie types and attribution hierarchy defines four cookie types, each with its own place in the ranking:

The nuance isn't obvious: a cashback site Awin itself has set to Incentive Click competes on genuinely equal footing with an influencer's Standard Click — whichever of the two was set most recently wins, exactly as with two ordinary creator links. But a voucher site set instead to Soft Click automatically loses to the influencer, regardless of when in the journey the customer clicked the deal site. Which category a given deal site actually falls into isn't something a creator or a brand can see from the outside — it's a setting inside the network's own partner catalogue. Other networks besides Awin run their own, not necessarily identical, models — the documentation above is specific to Awin, verified live 26 August 2026.

When it became a lawsuit: the PayPal/Honey case

The problem isn't theoretical. On 21–22 December 2024, YouTuber MegaLag published an investigation accusing PayPal's Honey browser extension of overwriting other affiliate partners' — including influencers' and content creators' — tracking cookies with its own, right before a customer completed a purchase. The allegation triggered a series of class actions in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, later consolidated under case number 5:24-cv-09470, where plaintiffs allege that code inside Honey's extension deleted the original affiliate's identifying information and inserted PayPal's own, so the merchant credited Honey/PayPal for the sale instead of whoever had actually driven the customer there.

The case had a concrete consequence at the very network whose cookie hierarchy is described above: Awin Group confirmed on 21 January 2026, following a formal investigation, that Honey's browser extension had violated Awin's publisher policies through systematic affiliate-commission diversion — and suspended Honey's payments and access to new advertiser programs the same day. On 22 June 2026, Judge Beth Labson Freeman of the U.S. District Court denied PayPal's motion to dismiss the case; every one of the plaintiffs' claims survived, and the case moved into discovery. The case remains unresolved — no finding of liability or damages has been made at the time of writing — but it shows that one of the industry's own networks judged a cookie-overwriting problem of exactly this type serious enough to suspend a major partner over it.

Honey is a browser extension, not a classic cashback or deal site encountered mid-checkout — but the underlying mechanic the lawsuit turns on is identical to the one this section describes: a late click from a third party overwriting an earlier, genuine referral's cookie under last-click attribution.

Worked example (hypothetical)

The numbers below are hypothetical and for illustration only. This is not a real Make Influence customer case, and none of the figures are benchmarks.

An influencer drives 1,000 clicks to a brand's webshop during a campaign period. The agreed commission is 15% of a DKK 600 average order value = DKK 90 per converted sale. Assume 120 of the 1,000 customers convert, and 25 of them also visit a cashback site along the way, whose click is set to Incentive Click on the network.

Same 25 customers, same campaign — but an entirely different outcome for the influencer's reported result, depending purely on a setting inside the network's partner catalogue that neither party can typically see from the outside.

How brands can detect and reduce it

• Ask your network directly which cookie status each cashback and voucher partner in your program has — "Incentive Click" or "Soft Click" at Awin, or the equivalent designation at another network. Don't assume every cashback partner is automatically "protected against" overwriting an influencer.
• Compare an influencer's reported sales against what was actually paid out whenever a number looks lower than the click volume suggests — the same diagnostic approach described in when two creator links both claim the same sale.
• Consider a shorter attribution window or a different tracking method for campaigns where cashback overwriting is a genuine concern — see attribution windows in influencer marketing and discount codes vs tracking links for the alternatives.
• Watch your network's own enforcement actions — Awin's suspension of Honey in January 2026 shows networks do act once the pattern is documented, but that typically only happens after an outside party (in this case, a YouTuber) makes the case publicly.

Decision framework

• IF you run your influencer program through an open network like Awin → ask the network to confirm which cookie status each cashback and voucher partner has, before you assume the influencer's click is protected.
• IF you see an unexplained drop in a particular influencer's conversion rate mid-campaign → check whether a cashback or deal site appears in the same customer journeys before concluding the content itself isn't working.
• IF you work directly with influencers with no open network in between → the risk still exists if the customer independently seeks out an external cashback site, but you have no network hierarchy to lean on — see how influencer tracking actually works for how your own cookie mechanics behave in that case.
• IF you suspect a specific partner is systematically overwriting other partners' clicks without being entitled to → that's exactly the behaviour Awin itself acted on in the Honey case; raise it as a concrete case with your network, not just a general concern.

Make Influence's operational perspective

Make Influence doesn't host cashback or voucher partners as a separate partner type inside our own tracking — as described in how influencer tracking actually works, we use a 30-day cookie plus a 3-month IP fallback, not an open network with configurable partner hierarchies. But many of our brands also run a separate affiliate program through a network like Awin or impact.com alongside their influencer campaigns — and in that scenario, it's the network's hierarchy, not Make Influence's, that decides who gets credit if a customer also touches a cashback site. Our recommendation is the same discipline as for click conflicts between two creators: know your network's actual rules before you read a low conversion number as a problem with the content or the influencer themselves.

FAQ

Can a cashback site always overwrite an influencer's tracking cookie?

No. It depends on which cookie status the network has assigned the specific cashback or voucher partner. At Awin, a partner set to "Incentive Click" competes on equal footing with the influencer's click, while a partner set to "Soft Click" automatically loses to an influencer in the same customer journey.

Is it illegal for a cashback site to overwrite an influencer's cookie?

Competing for the last click within a network's own published rules isn't in itself illegal or against the rules. The PayPal/Honey case is instead about an alleged hidden mechanism that plaintiffs say circumvented the networks' own stand-down rules — it's that hidden circumvention, not the last-click competition itself, the case turns on.

How do I find out if this is happening in my own campaign?

Ask your network for reporting that shows which partners touched the same customer journey as a given influencer conversion — the same approach described in when two creator links both claim the same sale. A systematically low result for one particular influencer, with no content-based explanation, is the typical warning sign.

Does the same thing apply to browser extensions like Honey as to classic cashback websites?

The underlying mechanic — a late click overwriting an earlier one under last-click attribution — is the same. But Awin doesn't necessarily classify every browser extension and every cashback website identically; check the specific partner's cookie status with your own network rather than assuming the category decides it.

Can I prevent it entirely?

Not completely, if the customer independently and freely chooses to visit a cashback site. You can instead make sure the network has the right cookie statuses set, monitor for unexplained drops in an influencer's results, and — where relevant — choose a tracking method with less exposure to late overwriting; see discount codes vs tracking links.

Does this same cookie-competition risk apply to price comparison sites like PriceRunner or Prisjagt?

Not automatically. A price comparison site's own publicly described model is typically a direct, click-based deal with the store — structurally different from a cashback site's shared network cookie. See price comparison sites (PriceRunner, Prisjagt) as an influencer marketing tracking channel for when a price-comparison placement is instead enrolled as an ordinary network partner, where the same last-click competition described above does apply.