Capital One Shopping is a public shopping portal that people either love or hate. Some hate it for tracking issues they’ve had (for what it’s worth, I’ve earned five-figures worth of cash back in my household without much issue, but others have quit the portal entirely due to repeated problems, so YMMV) or for the fact that you can only redeem rewards for gift cards (though they have recently expanded gift card redemption options). On the flip side, some people love it because of the crazy targeted offers (I’ve recently had 40% back on Klook, 20% back on Hotels.com, 30% back on several car rental companies, as much as 70% back on Hostelworld, and a lot more. However, I recently realized that I’ve probably missed a number of great targeted offers because of the way Gmail clips messages short.
The screen shot above is the bottom of a targeted Capital One Shopping email. I get emails like this every day or two, with elevated targeted rates at a wide range of brands. I most often check the email address associated with my Capital One Shopping account on my phone, just quickly scrolling the list to see if any of the merchants in the email matter for me.
It only recently registered in my brain that many of these targeted emails are getting truncated, as indicated by the link at the bottom to “View entire message”. Sure enough, when I clicked that link, I had several additional targeted offers (in the screenshot below, see LOJEL, Vacations by Marriott, and Avis, which were not shown in my Gmail app!).
I went back through old emails and noticed that many of them had been truncated, and when I clicked through to view the entire message, in many cases I had some really good offers of 25%, 30%, 40%, and as much as 70% back that I hadn’t noticed because I’d missed that link at the bottom of the message.
I did know that Gmail sometimes cuts off a message, it just hadn’t registered for me that they were doing so with Capital One Shopping emails, so I thought it may be useful to highlight this for other Capital One Shopping users.
In separate but related news, Capital One Shopping continues to expand redemption options. Today, a reader pointed out that Best Buy and Verizon have shown up, along with many other options. About a month ago, I was seeing around 35 gift card redemption options. Today, I have 97 merchants. Your mileage may vary, but if you haven’t looked at Capital One Shopping in a while and you have rewards accumulated, it is worth checking whether any of the current merchant gift cards meet your needs.
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I love Capital One shopping. So far all of my orders have tracked. I just read the T&Cs and follow them and havent had any issues.
Capital one offers on the other hand are a bit more painful.