I’m a big fan of the reliability of the Rakuten shopping portal (and the ability to earn either Amex Membership Rewards points or Bilt points through Rakuten). Over the years, I’ve also earned a lot through sites like TopCashback, Retailmenot, Mr. Rebates, and Be Frugal. Now and then, I get drawn into an airline shopping portal (usually for the combination of miles and status earning). But despite having used many different shopping portals over the years, there’s no portal I’ve used more in the last couple of years than Capital One Shopping.
Love it or hate it, many people have an opinion about it. Some readers have had so many issues with things tracking (or, rather, not tracking) that they’ve sworn off Capital One Shopping entirely. I get that! I would be frustrated if my orders weren’t tracking, too.
I’ve been fortunate to continue to do really well with the big targeted Capital One Shopping. Still, in recent months, while I’ve had a few really nice wins, I recently made a rookie mistake that cost me rewards, and which I should have known how to avoid. I wanted to share a little bit of both, with a few notable takeaways from a number of my recent Capital One Shopping experiences.
Recent Capital One Shopping “wins”
T-Mobile Home Internet: $600 back
Probably my biggest win in the last few months was with T-Mobile Home Internet. I saw an offer in a Capital One Shopping email for $600 back with T-Mobile Home Internet. I’m already a T-Mobile Home Internet subscriber, so I signed up for T-Mobile Home Internet at a family member’s address. I purchased this on March 3rd, and I kept service a little bit beyond the expected payout date of May 31st, which meant that I ultimately had to pay for four months of service (a little over $200). The order tracked a few days after purchase, so I kept an eye on the expected payout date. The $600 was credited to my account on either May 31st or June 1st. I’ve since canceled the service and was happy with a really super easy win.
I’ve written before disambiguating between:
- Capital One shopping
- Capital One offers
- Capital One travel offers
This post is about Capital One Shopping, the public shopping portal that anybody can use. You’re limited to redeeming these rewards for gift cards, and the selection of merchants sometimes varies. However, I find it really useful for redeeming for hotels.com or Marriott gift cards. I would buy a $600 gift card for either of those merchants for $200 all day long, so this was a great deal.
70% back on Ray-Ban Meta glasses via EyeBuyDirect
Back in February, there was a day when EyeBuyDirect was Capital One Shopping’s Deal of the Day.
I’ve been buying eyeglasses online for almost twenty years. Having shopped a lot of the cheapest sites on the internet, I’ve now settled on buying most of my glasses from KITS.com. I really like the quality and price from KITS, so I mostly ignore other online sites.
Thus, when I saw an offer for 70% back on EyeBuyDirect, I had initially ignored it. However, late in the day, I saw a member of our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group report that they had bought Ray-Ban Meta glasses from EyeBuyDirect in the past when the Capital One shopping rate had been boosted. They reported that the purchase had tracked and paid out as expected. Sure enough, I clicked through and ordered a pair, getting both the glasses and ~$280 in Capital One Shopping Rewards for $400.
I should note that when EyeBuyDirect was boosted again a couple of months later, a few readers reported orders that did not track as expected and/or that EyeBuyDirect might have added exclusions. I’m not sure that this specific site would work for a future order of the same, but I was thankful to have picked up a great tip on a deal I’d have otherwise ignored, thanks to our Facebook group.
The real point here isn’t to suggest that you save on this specific item with this deal. Rather, it was a good reminder for me that when I see a really big targeted portal offer, it might be worth going to the merchant website to figure out if they sell something I wouldn’t have otherwise thought to buy from that site. I’ve often gotten some of my very best shopping portal deals by purchasing items from unexpected places.
Sixt tracked well after the fact (and better than expected)
Last month, I rented a car in Orlando, Florida. Because of a targeted Capital One Shopping email with an offer for 45% back at Sixt, we rented a full-size car through Sixt for about $261.75 (we were ultimately upgraded to a huge Ford Expedition, which wasn’t necessary but certainly was comfortable for a few days).
I’ve written in the past that travel-related purchases are prone to weird tracking with Capital One Shopping. Somewhere in the terms, Capital One Shopping says that travel-related purchases may show up as “ineligible” until after travel is completed. Sure enough, I’ve run into a number of cases where a travel booking has shown up under my tracked orders, saying that it was ineligible, as though it was ineligible to earn any rewards. As I’ve reported previously, in those cases, my ineligible travel bookings have usually become eligible and credited after travel was completed. It’s a really poor way to handle tracking, but that’s what they do. My main failure point has been with Avis rental cars, which have not tracked properly for me (I’ve stopped trying).
I was thus concerned when I rented from Sixt for the first time in a long time, mostly due to the 45% offer, and I didn’t see my rental car reservation tracked in the days and week after making my booking. It didn’t show up in my tracked orders at all, and if I went back through all of my web page clicks, I could see the click to Sixt, but Capital One Shopping didn’t indicate that I had made a qualifying reservation. I checked the day that I picked up the rental car. I checked during my rental. I checked each day for probably a week after the trip, and the rental did not show up as tracked. I was disappointed and thought that I would have to try to follow up with Capital One Shopping customer service.
One day last week, I was very surprised to see that almost a month after picking up the car, the rental had appeared in my account and was already credited with $111.13 back.
There were a few notable things here:
- Sixt rentals apparently may not show up at all until after the rental. That’s disconcerting, but the fact that it worked led me to make a few more Sixt reservations over the coming month, so we’ll see if this pattern continues. It is at least good to know that it might work this way.
- The 45% back tracked on more of the rental cost than I expected ($111.13 represented not only 45% back on the daily rental fee, but also 45% back on the fees other than taxes). That was helpful to know for the purpose of taking advantage of another Sixt deal this week (more details to follow)
- The 45% back tracked even though my wife had booked with her Sixt Platinum member discount. I wasn’t sure whether that might invalidate the cash back, but it didn’t.
Speaking of Sixt Platinum, we wanted to make this reservation in my wife’s name (I had a second booking in my name and at the moment when we reserved, I wasn’t sure which we would keep). My wife had never rented from Sixt before, but before making the reservation, I had remembered that Sixt runs a continuous status match whereby they will match status from many different programs.
I had my wife sign up for a Sixt account and submit a screenshot of her Hertz President’s Circle status (which she has thanks to her Capital One Venture X Credit Card). Sure enough, her status match was instantly accepted, and she was upgraded to Sixt Platinum right away. As a Sixt Platinum member, she got a small discount. I was glad that the discount did not interfere with her Capital One Shopping rewards.
As mentioned above, we earned 45% back on more than expected. Here was the price breakdown:
The order tracked at $246.95.
While the numbers don’t quite line up perfectly, that suggests that the order tracked on approximately the “total net amount” before the $15.98 in sales tax. I find that notable because, on the Sixt website, the price was initially broken down as $181.47 in rental charges and $80.28 in “taxes & fees”. I assumed that the entire taxes & fees would be ineligible for rewards, but, based on how my booking tracked, I expect that it’s only the sales tax that is excluded from earning rewards, and that the rental cost is viewed as the total with the rental charge and fees other than taxes.
That made a difference for me because, earlier this week, I was targeted for $75 back on $200 at Sixt.
I had an upcoming booking to make where it appeared that renting a full-size car might not trigger the offer since the daily rental rate only came to about $136, with $101.77 in “taxes & fees”.
However, only about $32 of that is actual tax (the rest are the typical rental car fees). That means that the total before tax was just over $200. I am cautiously optimistic that this rental will trigger the $75 in rewards.
If not for my experience with the Orlando rental and seeing that it tracked based on more than just the daily rental rate, I would have assumed that I’d have needed to book a more expensive car (spending $200 before all fees) in order to trigger this offer. We’ll see how it works out next month, but I am hopeful that this rental will trigger the offer.
$100 back on a $100+ hotel via Home Page Activation Offer
A few months ago, we started seeing Capital One Shopping add special home page activation bonus offers featuring some highly boosted rates for specific types of purchases and/or specific stores. Not everybody sees these offers, which are clearly labeled as Home Page Bonus Activation offers with a limit of one use per person. It seems like new and/or dormant accounts might be more often targeted for these, but it is hard to say for sure.
These home page activation offers show up in a box between the deal of the day at the top and the rest of your targeted offers and are clearly labeled as home page activation bonus offers, typically with much better paybacks. See the example offers below, which we received last month.
One of the above was good for $100 back on a hotel booking of $100 or more. Clicking through showed that the amount in rewards varied a bit by booking site (see below where I could have earned $100 back from Caesars, but only $80 back from Expedia, Hotels.com, or Travelocity).
I booked a hotel through Priceline where we intended to stay (for a different trip — not a Caesars property), making a prepaid booking of about $178 and getting $100 back. We wouldn’t get hotel elite benefits, but this was for a third room on a family trip that wouldn’t have had elite benefits anyway. We were happy to effectively get more than half the cost of the hotel room back. The rewards from that purchase are only pending — I don’t expect to see them credited until after travel is completed.
A Capital One Shopping unforced error
$100 back on $100+ in event tickets fail
Similar to the hotel offer, we had an offer for $100 back on $100+ for event tickets that was available across many sites.
We have plans to see a show with our kids next month, and tickets through VividSeats were just over $100 per person. I found four available seats, and since my wife and I both had this offer, as did a third family member, I decided to split up the orders. I bought two tickets in my account for about $200, and that worked fine to trigger the $100 back from the home page activation bonus offer.
I then split the remaining two tickets across my wife’s account and another family member’s account, having each of them buy one ticket for just over $100 in each of their accounts. I fully expected those purchases to pay back the $100; however, I got bitten by a silly mistake here.
VividSeats, like several other ticketing websites, now shows the all-in price for tickets by default, whereas, in years past, you used to see a cheap price advertised up front only to find out on the checkout page that there were many additional taxes and fees. All-in pricing is better, but, silly me, it didn’t even dawn on me to expand the details and notice that the ticket I was buying was really about $72, and the other ~$30 was made up of taxes and fees. Sadly, my ticket purchase only tracked at about $72, so it wasn’t eligible for the offer to earn $100 back on $100 or more.
I should have known better and double-checked the full cost breakdown on the VividSeats website. Had I simply purchased seats in two pairs rather than trying to extreme stack by splitting it up over three purchases, I’d have earned another $100 in rewards. Instead, I lost the chance to use that offer across two accounts since the offer disappeared after activating it for these (ineligible) purchases. Lesson learned: check the price breakdown for event tickets to make sure it costs enough to trigger the offer before fees.
Bottom line
I continue to heavily use Capital One Shopping for its excellent targeted rewards offers. Sometimes I see those terrific offers on the home page of my Capital One Shopping account, but many times, the best offers arrive via email. Any time an email comes in from Capital One Shopping, I take a look. I tend to click through those email offers in a browser where I have the Capital One Shopping extension installed so that it’ll pop up and confirm the offer during the checkout process. That said, I’ve also clicked through email offers in my wife’s account in a browser where she does not have the extension installed, and in my experience, the purchases have tracked fine that way also.
As noted at the top, I know that some readers have run into a lot of issues with Capital One purchase tracking failures. In my case, my recent major fail was all my doing for not realizing the price breakdown of the tickets I was buying. Otherwise, I found some great deals via Sixt, thanks to expected rewards, and I was glad to learn that I should earn rewards on most of the Sixt fees (and that the Platinum member discount wouldn’t invalidate rewards). I haven’t been so lucky with Avis, but I’ve had a number of recent offers for Priceline, so if I need to book an Avis car, I’ll probably look to do it through Priceline. Either way, the rewards I continue to earn through Capital One Shopping keep it top of mind when I’m shopping online.
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I’ve completely given up on C1 shopping. Basically if you use content blockers (how could you not?) and have ever had Rakuten on your device…good luck getting C1 to track. And the real problem is that you may not know whether it tracked or not until you are outside the return window for the item. Meanwhile Rakuten sends you an email after the purchase.
I’ve noticed Capital One Shopping targeting great offers in yet another way – through price comparisons on the Capital One Shopping website. If I search for and click on specific products in the search tab, Capital One Shopping shows a price comparison at various retailers and sometimes shows great offers that exceed my targeted email offers. In one recent example, I searched for an outdoor product and was presented with $40 back on an $80 purchase at both Ebay and Scheels. I clicked through to Ebay, made an unrelated purchase, and received the cash back, which showed up as a “Price Comparison Bonus” in C1 Shopping.
I made the EXACT same Vividseats mistake, albeit with a $250 back offer, and the base cost registered as $238. Ouchie! Thankfully my P2 account had the same $250 offer and I needed additional tickets, so I bought slightly more expensive seats two rows up. The second purchase did end up qualifying. For me, the real lesson was that I wan’t even REALLY in the market for any event tickets at the time, but I went searching for something anyway just because the offer was too juicy to pass up. Knowing that shopping portal mistakes/errors can and do happen, I should have first stopped and asked myself whether this was a purchase that I really wanted to make, instead of making frivolous purchases just to chase the deal!
IDENTICAL mistake -$250 offer-wasn’t looking for it,but went ahead anyway. Tracks $240.
Chased Customer Care & they offered 1 time courtesy adjustment !
Amazing, good for you. Will give this a try, but it’s been about 2 months now since the transaction so we’ll see.
I have a terrible time with orders tracking and getting the payout so I have mostly given up on C1 Shopping. Just checking now, I have some pretty good reactivation bonuses. Just to clarify, can I do multiple different reactivation bonuses. It states “Limit one Home Page Reactivation Bonus offer per user” and I just need clarification if that is per offer or if you can only get one reactivation bonus.
This is a very timely article because I actually need to order a second T-Mobile internet device for a relative’s home this week. Any suggestions on how to get targeted?
However, I’ve never had a Sixt rental track. I have several that are now well over a month or two in the past and nothing on the portal (it knows I visited the site, but nothing shows up on Rewards & Savings. And I rent a lot of cars — this could mean several thousand dollars a year to me.
Make sure to avail offers from T-Mobile also. I had like $200 VGC for 3months of service
I also enjoyed the benefits of Capital One shopping until recently when the County I live in instituted a 5cent bag fee which is wreaking havoc with online orders for pickup. I’ve lost rewards at CVS, Macy’s and Nordstrom when I order merchandise and choose to pick it up at the store because the store’s void the order and then re ring it to add the nickel because they package/bag the merchandise with your name on it so that they can locate it and insist that they have to charge the fee-even if you bring your own bag-since they’ve already used one. I’ve even offered the nickel in cash to keep them from re-ringing the sale (which voids the initial purchase) but they say they have to in order to account for the bag fee. I get it, but it is costing me money/rebates and now I often drive to stores in a different county when I order if the rebate is worth the cost of gas or resign myself to losing the rebate. I’ve even called Capital One in regard to this and pointed out that it’s the same charge plus 5 cents for the bag fee, and they apologized but simply said that the charge amount has to match the pending sale in their system or it won’t trigger the rebate.
I too have used Capital One Shopping and scored what I consider HUGE rewards, yet I too have to watch what posts, what shows up ineligible, etc. But the win far surpasses the effort. But I have to ask, how are you getting a $600 Marriott gift card for $200???? Inquiring minds want to know!
Sorry, I didn’t realize that wasn’t clear. That paragraph was about the offer to get $600 back on T-Mobile Home Internet. I mentioned that I paid for 4 months at a cost of about $200 and got $600 in rewards. Marriott is a redemption option. So, in that case, I spent $200 on T-Mobile Home Internet service that I didn’t need in order to earn $600 that can be turned into a Marriott gift card (since C1 Shopping rewards can’t be taken as cash). It was really just an example.
Thanks, I get it now. Good score! Keep up the good work; your newsletters are so informative!
Sixt car rental to qualify must be prepared or pay at pickup also works?
I paid at pickup. I should have included that.
Interesting that you have had issues with Avis posting. The only vendor I have had issues with is Enterprise. After 4 Enterprise bookings in a row did not credit I stopped trying. Everything else has posted just fine for me.
My problem with Avis is that there seems to be no way to remove all discounts, so it has my “Avis Worldwide” discount even if I try to remove all discount codes, and that seems to make Avis ineligible. Readers have said that the solution is to reserve while not logged in, but for me, the whole point of using a company like Avis is so that I can enter a loyalty number and skip the counter.
Oh right, I remember the Avis issue now. I don’t think I should have the same issue with Enterprise. I used points to pay for a free day on one rental but that wouldn’t explain all the failures.
I haven’t tried Enterprise — just haven’t run into a situation where they were my best option. I’ve had decent luck with Hertz (didn’t work in conjuction with a CDP I’ve used, but worked on other rentals just fine) and with booking rental cars via Priceline/Expedia as well as RentalCards dot com (which I believe is no longer available). I think maybe I did Budget and/or Thrifty at some point, but I can’t recall for sure.
Oddly enough I was just going back through my Capital One Shopping credits and whaddya know, all my old Enterprise rentals finally credited. Surprising since some of them had not credited 8-10 months after the rental was completed. Maybe they found a bug and went back through and cleared them out.
Congrats on the wins and thanks for the tips Nick. I continue to also have success with Cap1 Shopping but I’ve learned quite a few tricks to make sure the purchases track. Like you, I usually wait for “Deal of the Day” or email activation offers to go after.
– I only use a laptop to make purchases, since I’ve found the mobile app to be unreliable and track only some of the time
– once I click through an email to the website (using Chrome browser), I shop and before making the purchase, I click the extension icon (puzzle piece) to bring up the Cap1 extension showing the elevated offer. Almost always, I need to click there again to activate the offer
– right before finishing the purchase, I check the extension one more time to confirm the offer has been activated
My favorite and highest recent offers have been through Viator, EyeBuyDirect, and Columbia. And I’ve redeemed for hotels.com gift cards which saved me a ton on a recent trip to Europe in high season!
On a side note, it’s nice to see an edited, more concise article from you. Keep up the great work! – Michael
I haven’t been a huge C1 Shopping fan, mostly due to lame redemption options (I don’t have Walmart or Apple as options), but I recognize that’s largely a matter of personal preference. However, now I have a whole new, much more serious, frustration. When I logged in today to check my redemption options, I received an error that said “additional verification required.” The only option to fulfill this verification requirement is to link a bank account via Finicity (like Plaid, but seems to be backed by Mastercard). Upon clicking into the portal to do this, it shows that an enormous amount of personal information is shared, including partial account numbers, balances, account types, in transaction data.
I can appreciate C1 shopping wanting to have some sort of identity verification in place to prevent multiple accounts. But requiring this level of data sharing to do that is way out of line in my opinion.
Even more annoying, because there was no other option, I reluctantly went ahead and linked a random bank I have with just one seldom used checking account. But even after doing that, it didn’t unlock my account. It just went into a “review pending status.” The page says account review should be resolved within 3 to 5 business days, but reports on Reddit showing this taking weeks for some.
This is a really good point that deserves attention here at some point. I’ll make a note to post about this.
My account didn’t require this, neither did my wife’s or a couple of her family members. We’ve all redeemed rewards without this step. However, my parents ran into this. I don’t like the sound of the amount of information they required either. Though, like you, I can imagine that they may have needed to institute something to prevent people from just creating one account after another. Hopefully it doesn’t take too long but please keep me posted as to the timeline.
Will do. I don’t mind that they want to do identity verification, but there is no reason that the *only* option for doing that needs to involve linking a bank account. There are plenty of ID verification tools that don’t require sharing financial data. Further, I poked around on their site and they expressly state that they will use the data for reasons other than just ID verification — it is also used “on an ongoing basis in order to conduct internal analysis to improve our products and service services” (i.e., marketing).
You can de-link the account after verification — which I will plan to do — but I’m sure many (most?) probably don’t.
I saved screenshots of the error page and terms of what’s collected if you end up wanting them to include in a post, btw.
Update on the verification situation: After almost 2 weeks of my account being stuck in pending status (well past the 3-5 business days promised), I reached out to C1 Shopping for an update. I still haven’t gotten a response, but as of this morning my account is no longer “pending review”… instead its now requiring me to link a bank account for verification. Again. I still can’t access my rewards. This is so frustrating! We’re in escrow on a house and I sure would love to be able to redeem my rewards for gift cards that I can use to buy stuff we will need.
Thanks, Nick – this is very useful. I’m in the middle of something very similar re: Sixt.
Knock on wood, I don’t seem to have the major issues many folks apparently have with C1 Shopping. I document everything with screen shots just in case and I have had a couple incidents where customer service credited me based on these.
I have noticed a recent trend on their tracking dashboard. Instead of displaying as “Pending” or “Credited”, many shopping trips now show up as “Adjusted.” When I did the math, though they appear correct, but it is curious…
I’ve noticed that too on my account lately. All have credited the correct amount as well.
I get a lot of this too. My assumption has been that some of the huge payout rates are loss leaders for Capital One Shopping and that adjustment perhaps just means that they have adjusted it upward from whatever commission they earn. I don’t know that for sure. That’s just been the best guess I have since the rates do match what I expected in those cases.