If you have ignored previous coverage of the Capital One Shopping portal, you’re missing out on some terrific shopping portal returns.
Capital One Shopping, the public shopping portal that anyone can join, no Capital One card required, has re-won my heart this holiday season. That’s despite a couple of frustrations in recent months. I was more than a little frustrated at the one situation where it felt like they cheated me out of rewards, but I’ve since been paying close attention to detail and have returned to loving the insanity of their targeted offers.
For disambiguation: Capital One Shopping is different
Capital One has two similar but entirely different ways to earn rewards from shopping. This post is mostly about the public Capital One Shopping portal, which does not require any Capital One card account. The offers covered in post of the post below are public offers that anyone can get. When we talk about Capital One Shopping, we’re talking about this public shopping portal that works the same as a portal like TopCashBack or BeFrugal, only instead of getting cash payouts, the Capital One Shopping portal only offers gift cards as redemption options. The Capital One Shopping portal is not connected to a Capital One card account, so you can’t get a statement credit or cash out of the portal. Instead, you redeem for gift cards to places like Hotels.com, DoorDash, Safeway, Walmart, Home Depot, etc.
All that said, if you do have a Capital One credit card, you’ll also find similar shopping offers in your online account — but those operate a bit differently. I’ll cover that separately at the end of this post.
Crazy holiday shopping payouts
Over the past couple of weeks, my targeted Capital One Shopping offers have gotten really good.
In the past, offers seemed to top out at 30% back. However, over these past few weeks, there hasn’t really seemed to be a ceiling.
For instance, when I noticed that I had 58% back at Kate Spade New York, I encouraged my wife to pick out a new purse. She shopped the Cyber Monday sale and found something she liked as well as a gift for a family member. The 58% is on track to post as expected.
When I saw 60% back at Shoebacca, I grabbed some footwear that I didn’t necessarily intend to buy yet, but at 60% back I’ll be glad to have what I need in the closet at a nice savings.
I jumped on yet another offer for 30% back at The Children’s Place. Our shopping cart had just over $250 in clothes and we’ve now got more than $75 coming from Capital One Shopping. On top of that, we earned $120 in reward bucks for The Children’s Place, so we’ll get another order of clothes in the next few days. I don’t know whether we’ll also get 30% back when using the reward bucks, but that’ll be icing on the cake if I do.
I had an offer for 10% back at GiftCards.com. Terms typically indicate that orders for more than $2,000 will not qualify for rewards, so I made a gift card purchase for a bit less and my 10% tracked.
During our recent Million Mile Madness challenge, I booked several Hilton stays through a targeted offer for 30% back at Hilton.
That was on top of earning more than 6,000 Hilton points for the stay.
As you can see in the screen shot at the top, I’ve been targeted for up to 50.5% back at TripAdvisor. That rate is for activities bookings. I intend to book a couple of activities for trips next year to take advantage of that return.
Not quite everything has gone perfectly according to plan, though even in those cases it is a little difficult to complain.
For instance, I bought something through Neiman Marcus after clicking through from an email link that advertised 40% back on “everything else”.
I purchased an item that was exactly $250 that typically isn’t discounted / isn’t eligible for most coupon codes. The exclusions above only excluded Balenciaga, gift cards, and jewelry, so I placed an order giving it a shot. My order did track — and at $79.54, it’s for a nice amount back….but that’s not 40%. Specifically, it’s about 31.8% back. I have no idea why I got that weird amount tracking.
I may follow up with customer service as my order should have earned $100 back and I can’t figure out where they got the weird percentage amount. At the same time, I would have made that purchase still at 31.8% back. It’s annoying though that you have to keep an eye on things like that.
Truth be told, it’s been pretty rare that I’ve seen an incorrect payout like that.
More disturbingly, Capital One Shopping occasionally sneaks in some pretty hidden deal terms and exclusions that are worth knowing about.
Sneaky Capital One Shopping exclusions
I noted the Kate Spade deal above. We originally had a few gifts in our shopping cart. Luckily, my wife had the eagle-eye for an exclusion that I nearly missed — the exclusions here note that cash back is not eligible on the purchase of gift cards or on orders that include 3 or more items.
Even after reading that, it was my wife who reminded me that I had 3 items in my cart and needed to drop one or risk not earning any rewards on the purchase. That seemed like an extreme exclusion, especially during the holiday shopping season (yes, separate orders seem to have tracked just fine).
Sneakier yet are the targeted email offers. I get offers all the time that look like this one:
I got a good offer via email just like the above but for StubHub a few months ago. I clicked through and bought 9 tickets to an NFL game (a bunch of family members attended a game this fall). I expected something like 22.5% back on a purchase of a couple thousand dollars. Only $250 in rewards tracked. When I followed up with Capital One Shopping, they claimed a limit of $250 in rewards on a single transaction. I pushed back, having earned more than $250 in rewards from a single transaction numerous times before and not finding a limit listed in the online terms on the website. Customer service pointed me back to fine print at the bottom of the email offers:
As you can see, the email terms note that you may not earn more than $250 in rewards in any single transaction. That’s sneaky. It isn’t an official term found anywhere in the shopping portal terms & conditions — and I’ve earned more than $250 from a single transaction after clicking through from the portal website numerous times before. But the emails seem to contain this term (I would swear that they didn’t always have this because I don’t recall it being present in past emails, but I do see it in all new emails now).
Newer targeted emails now sometimes make the $250 cap clearer as shown at the top of this post and below. That’s at least better than the emails that only advertise great headline rates with no mention of a cap.
I find this very problematic as many of their emails are misleading by burying the $250 cap in small print. However, again, I haven’t found the $250 rewards cap to apply when clicking through from the website, so I’m simply keeping under the $250-back limit when clicking through from emails.
I’m definitely still pretty burned over the StubHub offer, but in the overall scheme of things I’ve come out well ahead with offers like the ones noted in this post.
How do you find and use targeted Capital One Shopping offers?
The question above has a multi-pronged answer and is really the heart of Capital One Shopping complexity. The Capital One Shopping portal is not as simple as other portals, for better and worse.
You need to know that there are several different ways to access / get offers from Capital One Shopping. Offers frequently vary between these channels:
- Capital One Shopping website (“desktop” platform)
- Capital One Shopping browser extension
- Capital One Shopping emails
- Capital One Shopping app
- If you have a Capital One credit card, you’ll also find shopping offers in your online login, and those are often different.
It’s worth noting that you may get targeted offers from all of the above and they won’t necessarily match from one platform to the next. You want to be able to monitor all of them.
Capital One Shopping website offers
On the desktop site capitaloneshopping.com, you’ll find various targeted offers by scrolling on the home page when logged in (anyone can make an account for free — again, this isn’t a Capital One account but rather just a Capital One Shopping account).
You’ll often see different targeted offers for the same store. See below — depending on which button I click, I could get either 2.5% back or 18% back at Belk. I should obviously click the 18% back button!
If I do this in the browser where I have the Chrome extension installed, it typically does pop up confirming the rate (in this case the 18%) during the checkout flow process. Which offer it shows just depends on which button you click. It’s worth mentioning that those buttons sometimes show specific products (like the Adidas one above that shows the “Lite Racer” sneakers). You do not need to buy the advertised product to get the advertised rate. Typically, buying anything at the website in question will get the advertised rate. There are a few exceptions to that — like if you click through any shopping portal to the Office Depot website and buy a gift card, rewards aren’t going to track because Office Depot doesn’t process gift card transactions directly (they use GiftCardMall). However, whether you buy a printer or a laptop or a ream of paper, it’ll track rewards regardless of which product may be shown in your targeted offers.
Note that the spread between different targeted offer buttons can be massive. For instance, I saw offers for Sketchers starting at 2% back.
However, when I scrolled far enough, I eventually found a button good for forty-two percent back!
Sure enough, if I click through that 42% button, the Capital One Shopping extension confirms the 42% back with an activation button once I go to my shopping cart.
I wasn’t actually buying those shoes, I just threw something random in my cart to demonstrate how the extension would pop up with the correct rate based on the button I’ve clicked.
An important note: I never use the search box on the Capital One Shopping home page! That’s because searching in that box only checks regular rates. Targeted rates, which you’ll find by simply scrolling down (or checking email) are very often far, far better. If I don’t have time to scroll through endlessly, I’ll just quickly drag the mouse to the bottom of the page repeatedly (too fast to actually see everything). Then, when I finally find the bottom (which takes quite a while even this way!), I’ll use Ctrl+F on my keyboard to search the page for a store name — and I’ll be sure to “next” through every mention of the store name looking for the best payouts.
Capital One Shopping email offers
Capital One Shopping frequently sends targeted email offers. These often seem to be influenced by websites you browse in the browser where you have the Capital One Shopping extension installed. If I’m hoping for an offer for a particular site, I’ll often open it up and browse around in the browser where the extension is installed. I often get a targeted email offer for that site a few days later.
Clicking through from an email offer in the browser where you have the extension installed should also result in the extension popping up confirmation of that email-advertised payout provided that you’ve clicked through from the email. For instance, I have recently received email offers for 34% back at Belk.
If I click through from that email, the extension should pop up confirmation of that offer during the checkout process.
Personally, I prefer not to have the extension installed in my main browser instance collecting all of my browsing data, so I created a separate Chrome profile that I only use when I want to use Capital One Shopping. You can add a Chrome profile by clicking on your picture or initial in the top right corner of Chrome.
I only have the Capital One Shopping extension installed in the “Nick” profile above, so I use that browser instance for Capital One Shopping. I’ll also open those email offers in that browser instance and then click through so that the extension can pick up the click and confirm the rate.
I should note that there are some instances where the extension will pop up a different offer. It’s unclear exactly how long targeted email links will work. Some may work longer than others.
For instance, within the last week, I received an email offer that included a link for 70% back at Extra Holidays, a booking engine for Wyndham vacation rental properties.
A few days later, I received a targeted email offer for 30% back from Extra Holidays. A few days after receiving that 30% offer, I went back to the email with the 70% offer. I clicked through from that email to the Extra Holidays site in the browser where I have the Capital One Shopping extension installed. Sure enough, the extension popped up with the 70% offer during the booking flow.
That particular booking hasn’t tracked yet, so the jury is still out.
Capital One Shopping phone app
Truth be told, I installed the Capital One Shopping app a long time ago, but I haven’t spent much time checking targeted offers in the Capital One Shopping app on my phone recently. However, I have definitely noticed different payouts there in the past, so it’s probably worth checking there also!
Keep in mind that you’re trading cash for gift cards
One thing I want to mention about the above is to keep in mind that you shouldn’t value the payouts quite like cash back. That’s because Capital One Shopping rewards can only be redeemed for gift cards.
While I was happy to get high payout rates for holiday shopping purchases, the fact is that I was trading cash for gift cards.
For instance, that Kate Spade offer shown above was for $313 and we received $181.54 back. But that’s not cash! That’s gift cards. So while it is really tempting to mentally account for it as though the bags only cost $132 (since I got $181 back), the truth is that I spent a full $313. I’ve just tied up $181.54 in gift cards. Essentially, I paid $313 and I got two purses and a $181.54 Walmart gift card (that’s how I’ll redeem the rewards).
In my case, I value that closer to cash back than some will. That’s because Walmart is back as a redemption option and we do a fair amount of dry goods grocery shopping at Walmart. We certainly spend at least as much per month as I’ll have earned in rewards from the shopping trips noted above. So, in my case, I’d have spent that money at Walmart anyway, I’m just sort of indirectly buying the gift cards.
However, your situation may vary. It’s important to remember that you’re tying up that “return” in gift cards that may have less than face value to you (particularly true since many of those brands can be purchased at a discount).
Note that some readers have reported problems
I want to mention here that we have received some reader complaints about orders not tracking properly through Capital One Shopping.
I should first note that over the years, we have received reader complaints about every single shopping portal in existence (and most hotels and airlines). If I stopped writing about every company with which some readers have had a bad experience, I’m not sure there would be any companies left to write about.
But I note here that we’ve received some reader complaints about Capital One Shopping because I know that some readers who are very experienced with portals have had stuff fail to track properly with Capital One Shopping. It’s even happened within our own team: Greg and I have both had great success with Capital One Shopping, but Tim has had difficulty getting orders to track.
I don’t know why some have had a lot of trouble with Capital One Shopping. I follow the same best shopping portal practices with Capital One Shopping that I use with othr portals and my orders always track as expected. I sometimes receive a reader report that they think the portal mysteriously failed to track their order because it was a “big order”, but in my case I’ve earned thousands of dollars in gift cards from Capital One Shopping almost without issue (apart from the StubHub deal noted above, a Saks order that didn’t track at the right rate once (at a time when Saks orders were wacky across the board), and one order I placed at Lenovo where customer service helped when I followed up. I’ve had tons of success otherwise — certainly more than failures.
Still, it’s worth knowing that you may be in for frustration with Capital One Shopping. I personally still recommend it to friends and family because I’ve found it to work well, but I suppose your mileage may vary.
How do you know that a Capital One Shopping order tracked? When will it pay out?
I’ve written about this before, but I find that many don’t know how and where to see pending Capital One Shopping transactions. If you go to the web platform and click on “Help” in the top right corner, it will show recently tracked transactions with a purchase date and the date rewards are expected to become redeemable. This is where I found the many screen shots above showing my tracked orders.
Capital One Shopping does sometimes send out an email to let you know that an order has tracked. However, that isn’t consistent — I only sometimes receive those emails (and when I do, it is typically well after I’ve seen the order tracked in the “help” tab).
Keep in mind that it typically takes at least days and sometimes longer (maybe weeks) before a tracked order shows up. While some portals have become remarkably good at reporting tracked orders quickly, I’ve been playing the shopping portal game for long enough to remember when portals often took 30 or 45 days to track an order. I’m pretty patient about waiting. My orders usually track as expected.
If you have a Capital One credit card (and if you prefer miles), try logging in to your credit card account
Everything above applies solely to the public shopping portal that anyone can join.
However, if you have a Capital One credit card, it’s worth logging in to your credit card account and checking out targeted offers there as well. You’ll find these under your card information in your credit card login.
Until sometime this year, those offers only yielded “cash back” in the form of statement credits. However, these days, if you have a card that earns miles, you’ll see mileage payouts. They can sometimes be very good — perhaps even better than rates through Capital One Shopping.
For instance, my wife was browsing her offers yesterday and saw one goof for 30x miles at Staples.
If you value Capital One miles somewhere around 1.5c per mile, that could be a really attractive portal rate.
A member of our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group noticed an even more compelling offer yesterday, with an email/SMS marketing subscription service offering up to 154 miles per dollar spent.
I didn’t end up using that one because it wasn’t clear to me how long you need to be subscribed to receive the payout, but some folks found a subscription that costs more than $675 for a month and they took a shot at earning 105,000 miles.
Note that in my experience, when clicking through from offers in my online account, I did have to use my Capital One card to get the advertised payout. That’s not true on the public Capital One Shopping portal offers covered in most of this post, but it has been true for those offers I found within my Capital One credit card login.
Bottom line
I continue to rock the Capital One Shopping offers. While I’m not completely enamored with the portal, the returns have been hard to ignore. While some have reported problems with orders tracking, I’ve had nearly 100% success with the portal. Targeted offers had slowed considerably during the first half of 2024, but holiday shopping offers have really started heating up recently. I’ve been particularly excited by payouts like 50% back on activities at TripAdvisor, 30% back on Hilton, 25% back on Hertz, and other similar offers that have enabled me to earn a really nice return on some of my travels. However, for holiday shopping, I’ve also done really well checking all of my various targeted offers.
If you’ve been sleeping on Capital One Shopping, it might be time to wake up — the payouts they offer probably won’t last at these types of rates forever, but it’s well worth keeping an eye on them for now.
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An easy way to scroll to the bottom is to hold the “End” key for around 10 seconds. The “End” key will scroll to the bottom which will trigger new deals to load and then it will scroll down to the bottom again until all are loaded.
I ordered an Xbox Series S from Dell with my Amex $200 Dell credit and got 10% back with an Amex offer and 30% back with Capital One shopping.
[…] Still loving Capital One Shopping, but with some caveats […]
I wrote an AppleScript to automatically load all the deals and open the find in page input. This saves a lot of scrolling. I should add that to use you need to start Google Chrome and load up the Capital One Shopping page with the first page of deals. The script will then repeatedly load all the remaining deals and open the find window.
activate application “Google Chrome”
repeat 40 times
tell application “System Events”
key code 119
delay 0.7
end tell
end repeat
tell application “System Events” to keystroke “f” using command down
Seems hard to scale if rewards are capped at $250 per transaction.
That restriction appears in email offers, but nowhere on the website. I noted that I’ve earned more than $250 per transaction when clicking through from the desktop site numerous times.
This is a very interesting post. I haven’t spent much time with Capital One Shopping because it seemed like a bit of a pain, but also because I didn’t really know how to use it. The possibility of finding big discounts is certainly appealing, but has to be weighed against the downsides of rewards in the form of gift cards, sneaky exclusions, and a system to seems to have a greater chance of failure than some others. Plus even finding the deals to start with is a bit of a pain, but Nick’s suggestion of scrolling to the bottom and doing a find in page partly overcomes that. I also found could make a macro that repeatedly types the appropriate keyboard shortcut for scrolling to the bottom of the page (fn + right arrow on Mac) and then initiates a search so I could do everything with one click. It’s a small thing but these small efficiencies can make the difference between whether or not I take the time to check when I’m in the middle of shopping.
I’m not seeing any huge discounts myself but will keep checking. This time of year I find a lot of deals are more fashion oriented than we use in my family. (Although of course the recent $200 off at Backcountry with Chase was pretty sweet so there are deals to be found even for those of use who are fashion challenged.)
Thanks for this great post. Lots of fun things to try.
If you are an outdoors person (the Backcountry reference), I’ve received good targeted offers for REI (11.5%), Coleman (30-40%) and Decathalon (45%) this month. They don’t last long, but if you have the browser extension enabled, you can get some pretty great targeted emails on occasion.
Oh cool, I’ll check that out. Thanks for the tip! I don’t often see offers for REI and they can have some great deals (especially on REI branded items) so I’m always looking to stack. I do find enough offers in general (Amex, Chase, Rakuten, etc.) to make the hunt worthwhile. But it is also clear many of the biggest deals out there are for fashion brands, I assume because the most expensive brands have the most potential to cut. So it’s always a question of whether the juice is worth the squeeze to pursue another avenue for deals. So far for Capital One Shopping it hasn’t been, but now Nick’s post has given me some things to try that might shift the equation.
Now hoping I get something better than Neiman Marcus or Kate Spade… (A few years ago my wife was given a very expensive Kate Spade purse and she gave it to charity.)
You’re right that it makes sense that the fashion brands have the most margin and therefore the largest ability to offer huge payouts.
For what it’s worth, we’re not generally very fashionable. Kate Spade is a rare exception on the “fashion” front and one where I wouldn’t have spent hundreds on a bag, but in this case for $313 I got $181 in gift cards and two purses — a net of around $65 a purse to make the better half happy is a win in my book and a price point where I don’t care whether she buys this or something else (whereas I wouldn’t pay two or three hundred bucks for one).
Instead of strictly “fashion” items like handbags (apart from that one) and designer shoes or whatever, I’m usually shopping at those merchants for items that aren’t often discounted elsewhere. For instance, Neiman Marcus sells some Bang & Olufsen headphones/speakers (and a couple of Sennheiser things it seems) and at least in the past those were very good and not available at discounts elsewhere. They also carry Tumi luggage, which admittedly is on the “fashion” sort of end, but if I could get 40% back, the bags (at least the ones on sale) are more in line with those I might buy from another brand. My point isn’t really those specific items (you probably have no use specifically for B&O headphones or Tumi luggage) but rather than I find that “fashion” stores sometimes carry brands of stuff that I either might not ordinarily associate with that fashion brand or that I might not consider buying under normal circumstances because of the price, but with the right amount of portal cash those things might become more comparable. I would ordinarily associate a department store like Neiman Marcus with Chanel or Gucci or or Louis Vuitton or whatever and dismiss it as not carrying anything I’d buy (because I just don’t wear any of those types of brands), but I often spend some time looking afield at sites like that for the “other stuff” I may want/need/use. For instance, my wife does like nice skincare and perfume sometimes — she doesn’t need those things right now, but if I see a good payout at a department store, I’ll think about stuff like that because getting 40% back on a perfume she likes makes it not feel unreasonably expensive.
And Shoebacca is a great example of the kind of place that sometimes comes out of the blue. I’d never heard of that site, but they carry Saucony and Adidas and Nike and Clarks and Johnston & Murphy (all brands we do wear at least sometimes). Oddly, they also have some $15-$20 soccer balls (not something I’d have expected at a shoe store lol). I actually bought a pair of Birkenstock sandals that I’d have never bought at full price, but at 60% back I figured I’d give them a shot because I know that some people swear that they last for ~10 years and I figure that if I get 10 years out of them I’ll be happy enough after the 60% back.
Those are just a couple of examples. Again, they probably don’t apply to your situation, just sharing the way I look at payouts like those. The flip side is that I also see lots of stores where I see payouts might be a good deal but don’t really do anything for me personally (for instance, I had a targeted offer for 35% back at Duluth Trading Company and there’s a Chase Offer for 20% back. Even at 55% back in total, I just didn’t see anything that fit my needs). But I do enjoy a bit of the hunt and I find that part of the fun in the big payouts is finding what it is that might make sense for me at stores where I don’t otherwise shop.
And 9 or 10% back at GiftCards.com is always nice :-).
That’s very helpful. I admit I am probably skipping over some good opportunities assuming they won’t have anything I want. I do usually find my $40 item at Saks every 6 months, but it takes a lot of time and is barely worth the effort. I guess that is probably the other thing which is that with limited time I have to play the percentages and devote my efforts to merchants where I am likely to have good results.
However, you have convinced me to take the plunge and give Capital One Shopping a real chance. I’m a little scared, but I’m going in. If I’m not heard from again tell my wife and daughter I love them.
Interesting. So this morning the best deal I saw with REI was 1%. I clicked through to check that the Chrome extension was tracking. This afternoon it gives me 7.5% at REI with “Save at This Site You Recently Visited.”
Just a note: for Capital One Offers (the portal in your credit card account), per the terms, it is not necessary to pay with that Capital One card. I had an order track last week through C1 Offers where I used a Citi AA Platinum card (to also stack with Citi Merchant Offers) and another tracked where I paid 80% with a gift card from a previous return (Macy’s). I have not received a payouts yet, but they are listed as pending in the shopping trips section with the full purchase price. It will probably take another 25-30 days to hit, but I should get Venture miles for those transactions.
I have no doubt that the tracking is more reliable if you use a Capital One card. I’m also testing it for an IHG hotel. It does not yet show as pending, but we will see. I made a refundable booking, so no payment has been made. I expect to find out about that one around March. I am worried that portal tracking with further out refundable bookings just may not work well. I’m sure pay-up-front non-refundable stuff tracks better. I also have a Yeti order that I processed through PayPal with a CFF that hasn’t tracked, though it has been less than a week. The jury is still out on payment methods, I guess.
Good to hear that you’ve had success without using a C1 card! I gave up after a few didn’t track that way, but a successful DP means that it can work. That’s great to know! Now to decide whether to make my wife return the laptop she got so that we can buy from Staples for 30x C1 miles + 5x on the Ink Plus. Hmmmmm…..
Regarding one thing you said — “I’m sure pay-up-front-non-refundable stuff tracks better” — I wouldn’t be so sure about that. I know that, for instance, prepaid Hilton rates won’t trigger Hilton Amex offers (or at least didn’t in the past?) because the payment was processed differently for a prepaid reservation. I’m not so sure that a prepaid rate would work better since postpaid rates have probably long been commonly commissionable for travel agents, whereas a prepaid “member-only” rate probably isn’t?
Anyway, I don’t know for sure, I’m just not convinced that a prepaid rate would be more likely to work. I’ve generally had postpaid hotel reservations track properly through portals.
I’ve also had a number of purchases track and pay out through C1 Offers using various Chase Inks. However, the one time the purchase did not track, I ended up having to file a CFPB complaint because C1 customer service refused to even try to start a missing cashback claim through the affiliate network. So using a C1 card is safer because if the purchase does not track but they can see it on your C1 card statement, they will just issue a credit.
Note that for any big purchases I recommend following their tracking (and booking refundable/free returns).
I was excited about the 55% TripAdvisor rate for activities. Booked a couple things for upcoming trips (refundable). Next day it said ineligble. I rebooked, also through Capital One, for the same exact activity, via Expedia (at a lower rate) and that did track.
Again, see the quote from Nathan’s comment below: “certain travel purchases may show as ineligible until the stay / rental is complete.”
Looks like Nathan got that here https://capitaloneshopping.com/help?sp_faqs=true&active=115001151332-Returns-exchanges-and-exclusions
I expect a travel purchase that hasn’t happened yet may say “ineligible” until travel is complete.
That’s good to know theoretically, but cold comfort in most situations. I had the same experience as Max with booking a hotel through C1S and Klook. When that came back as ineligible, I rebooked through C1S/Priceline and the booking tracked. Who wants to take a chance in that situation that the “ineligible” will change months down the line when you can get a bird in the hand!
I bet the reason why you sometimes get a different reward than what was advertised like your experience with Niemann’s is precisely because they have so many variable rates. Someone probably adjusted the advertised rate but didn’t code the rate on the back end or maybe made a mistake entering the number.
Would you get a C1 card just to earn points via the shopping portal? The limited selection of gift cards is one reason why I often settle for a lesser rate from Rakuten.
No, I definitely wouldn’t get a C1 card for that. The rates through your card login are totally different and while there are some good ones right now, they are rarely anywhere near as good as the public portal (with the gift-card-only redemptions).
Having to redeem via gift cards is certainly unideal, but at the same time there are plenty of places where I regularly (or at least often enough) spend money. I mentioned Walmart in the post (and someone below highlighted the ability to use Walmart GCs at Sam’s Club also), but I’ve also redeemed a bunch for Hotels.com gift cards (used some for a stay at either Great Wolf Lodge or Camelbak in PA this spring and used some for our hotel stay in Mauritius this summer and will probably use some to go back to the Santa Claus Holiday Village in Rovaniemi next year) and I redeemed a bunch for DoorDash when we got stuck in Las Vegas last year with sick kids (had to cancel our trip to Fiji and stay in Vegas for almost two weeks, so those DoorDash gift cards helped defray the cost of eating in Vegas for so long!). I don’t live within the Kroger or Safeway footprint, but if I did I would love those. I don’t shop at eBay often, but I did buy a gift there during Black Friday / Cyber Monday deals. You can sometimes get some of those gift cards on sale, but like the day I went to book my hotel in Mauritius, there was no deal on Hotels.com gift cards — I wouldn’t have bought them in advance, but it was convenient to redeem at that point.
Great review, Nick. I especially appreciate how to look for deals on the website. Once the “filter” button we used to have went away, I was unsure of how to find the targeted deals. Also wondering–are the targeted deals a one-use only thing or have you tried placing more than one order?
lol – *definitely* not one use 🙂
Just a heads, up, they seem to have added more gift card redemption options. Kroger and Uber Eats stand out to me. As far as the portal goes, I’ve gotten about $5k back with C1 Shopping so far and have found it exceptional. Only problem recently was that the browser extension had something wrong which oddly enough seemed to cause offers clicked through from the email to not track. Otherwise it’s been pretty much all good for me.
Great catch! Kroger will be huge for a lot of people. I also see Celebrity Cruises in there. I don’t know if those work like Carnival ones, but might be an interesting thing if they do. Also see Walgreens and some others that weren’t there before. Thanks for the heads up on that!
Got 36% at tire agent, 27% at LG, 27% Mattress Firm, 27% at CK, 18% at Gap
Bought tires, TV, dryer, washer, mattress and some clothes. Holiday shopping was awesome this year with Capital one
Great post, Nick. I’ve also had my extremely positive feelings for C1 shopping tempered by some recent transactions being declared by them “Ineligible” when there was nothing in the emailed link that detailed terms I had supposedly violated. They need to have clear terms either in the emails, or the links should go to those terms rather than directly to the vendor website. That said, when I’ve reached out to them in the past, I’ve generally felt the responses were fair (i.e. they’ve usually credited me where I had a valid point).
What types of things have you had declared “ineligible”?
Had a future Hilton Garden Inn stay declared ineligible, versus the 30% emailed offer. I’m going to ask why, but am wondering if it is because I booked the “Hilton for Business” rate (though that is not among the listed exclusions, C1 may mistakenly think it is a negotiated corporate rate). A Zappos order was declared ineligible, and I have no clue why. I emailed and was told to circle back at 30-days.
If it’s a future stay, then that’s why it’s ineligible at this point. See Nathan’s comment below — he has this quote (which I imagine comes directly from the portal terms): “certain travel purchases may show as ineligible until the stay / rental is complete.”
My travel bookings often say ineligible until after travel. That makes sense to me since they aren’t eligible for rewards until after the stay has been completed.
Zappos is stranger. Did you use a personalized coupon code — like one of those where you enter your email address and you get a unique code for 10% off or something like that?
I did have a discount code, but the C1 email link said the only ineligible items were Birkenstocks (I ordered other shoes). I just checked C1 and the stated terms there (most of which were not in the email) are “*exclusions apply: Not available on the purchase of Gift Cards, Birkenstocks, including their family of brands (Birkenstock, Birkenstock Kids, Birkenstock 1774), and any Zappos at work purchases (ZAW). If Zappos VIP points or other discounts are applied to a purchase, post-discount subtotals will be used to calculate payout. Not available for orders deemed by store as being for reseller.”
So, there is no exclusion for a discount code, just that they (of course) will only give credit on the post-discount amount.
Ok, well, I agree that it doesn’t have that exclusion then, but it’s pretty standard that portals (in general, not just C1 Shopping) will not receive a commission (and therefore not pay one out) if you use a coupon code that’s not listed on the portal. It does sometimes still work with general discount codes (stuff like a “CYBERMONDAY” code that applies broadly), but generally speaking a unique coupon code (like one of those “enter your phone number and we’ll text you a code for 10% off” type codes) usually make the order non-commissionable. That comes down to the business model: essentially, a shopping portal is earning a commission for sending customers to the retailer and passing some of that commission on to you. If the retailer is able to draw you in without the portal, they don’t need to pay a commission. Generally speaking, if they’ve given you a unique code, most retailers look at that as them driving the sale rather than the portal and therefore they won’t pay out the commission — and if they don’t pay the portal, the portal doesn’t pay you.
That’s a generalization, but that would be my guess as to why it didn’t work. I specifically skipped entering my email for a 10% off code on one of these stores because I didn’t want to chance that a code that took off let’s say $10 was going to cost me $60 in rewards.
Fair point – thanks.
Data points of offers that say “up to 32% back” vs “24% back”?
The “activate” button when you click through usually explains the payouts. See the Neiman Marcus screen shot in the post where there were a couple different payouts.
Alternatively, if you go to the CapitalOneShopping website and see a targeted offer for the same store in the list as you scroll (doesn’t matter if the payout is the same), you mouse over the “i” next to the “Up to 32% back” and it pops up with an explanation for the different categories, which should help you know what categories qualify for the high payout you’re seeing in an email.
Nick, I really appreciate your posts on this topic!
I have often been shopping TripAdvisor tours and activities using the browser Cap1Shopping tracks and often get targeted offers. On Black Friday, I got the highest email offer I have seen: 60.5% back on TripAdvisor. Using that link with the offer activated, I made more than 10 bookings, mostly for travel dates next summer. I am concerned I may never see this cashback. I took screenshots of every booking, showing the activated offer in the extension during booking, but will that be enough? Will they be willing to research missing rewards 6-9 months after the purchase date?
Many of my TripAdvisor bookings are showing now in my history.
These all show as Shopping Rewards Status: Ineligible
I am assuming this is because “certain travel purchases may show as ineligible until the stay / rental is complete.”
Do others have experience booking 6+ months out with TripAdvisor and did the purchase change from Ineligible to post with the correct rate?
Several Viator bookings I made 2 years ago for travel 2 months out using similar 30% and 20% targeted offers did pay out as expected, unless I made any changes at all to the booking. For example, if i booked 3 people then before travel changed to 2 people and got a refund for 1, the transaction earned 0 Cap1 shopping rewards. Or if I modified the date or time without refund the transaction also earned 0 Cap1 shopping rewards.
Several activity booking I made using targeted TripAdvisor offers between 20% and 30% over the past year all posted but with a lower payout of 10%. These show in my transaction history as “Adjusted.” I did not take screenshots so did not open support cases.
A targeted 50% GetYourGuide offer credited the full amount for one booking I made a few days out but other bookings I made using similar GetYourGuide offers never credited at all. I did not take screenshots so did not open support cases.
I have several other excellent offers right now I am considering using for bookings over the next year with Expedia, Hilton, etc. I will be taking screenshots for every purchase. How confident do you think I should be of getting the promised payout rates?
I have never booked activities that far out, but I’ve booked hotels months out and it’s always worked as expected. I am a gratuitous screen shotter, so I always have tons of screen shots to follow up if necessary. I’d be pretty confident. I plan to make an activity booking (or maybe a few) for Europe in May or June today because I fully expect the 50.5% back to post. So long as you click through with the higher rate and click “activate” when the extension pops it up, I’d expect it to work fine.
As you noted, I would fully expect that any modification is going to void out cash back. That’s pretty standard practice — if you place an order with a merchant but then call to update your shipping address or change your payment method or something, I fully expect the action of a representative touching / modifying the order will almost always interfere with the tracking of cash back (with any portal). Sometimes it won’t, but when it doesn’t I’m pleasantly surprised. I expect no rewards because I expect that the digital trail no longer leads back to the portal but rather to the representative. Think of it like a chain of paper rings. A person touching the chain is very likely to rip it.
I can’t explain the adjusted lower payouts you mentioned. Oddly, I do find that my travel rewards often say “adjusted” even though they don’t appear to be. Like my recent Hilton stays where I got 30% back say “adjusted”, but they did post at the 30% I expected. I assumed that maybe that had to do with currency conversion — like maybe the order tracked at a spend of $220.32 but I was booking a Hilton in Vienna paid in Euros and maybe the exchange rate changed such that the final charge was $221.12 (or whatever it is) and so the rate got “adjusted” just to accommodate whatever the final charge showed. That’s a guess, but it seems like a reasonable one.
I guess there is probably a breaking point at which maybe I’d start to be hesitant about all of it working, but I don’t know where that is. Like I wouldn’t probably spend an amount where I’m counting on the rewards to the point where I’ll be stressed/upset/hurt if they don’t post. Like if I could afford to spend $1,000, I probably wouldn’t make $2,000 in bookings where I need that $1,000 back to post. Instead, in that situation, I’d be fine with making $1,000 in bookings expecting to get the $500 back but knowing that if I don’t I’m not going to be crying myself to sleep at night. And I’d still be upset if it didn’t post, and I’d follow up with customer service with my gratuitous screen shots, but I don’t want to be emotionally invested to the point where I’m going to lose sleep or be so angry that I swear off the portal forever. Does that make sense?