Exploring Increased Offers with the Capital One Shopping Portal

We’ve discussed the Capital One Shopping portal many times. The portal is available to everyone, even those who don’t have any banking relationship with Capital One Bank.

While I consider myself a veteran Capital One Shopping portal user, I’m continuously surprised to find new targeted offer locations in the portal. Like peeling away layers of an onion, there are a surprising number of ways to access special offers on the portal.

Cash Out Options

First, we should just mention that the portal only allows cashing out into gift cards, not Paypal, and so their currency is not as good as cash. That’s especially true as there are dwindling number of gift card options, with some of the better redemptions (like Walmart and eBay) being removed or only being there sporadically.

Honestly, despite some amazing offer rates, I’ve considered stopping to use the portal for this reason. That said, for now I’ve personally decided to continue to use the portal. Anyone who is a bit into the gift card reselling game can find a gift card which will convert to cash at 80-90%, even if you can’t find one for actual use.

With that out of the way, let’s look at how to get better targeted offers from the Capital One Shopping portal.

Targeted Offer Options

The regular rates on the portal are pretty standard. They don’t usually have any sort of public special offers like many other shopping portals. Where Capital One Shopping shines is in their targeted offers.

We covered this broadly in our prior post, Numerous Flavors Of The Capital One Shopping Portal, and I wanted to highlight some additional angles that I’ve since learned.

• Capital One Shopping website – the first step is to simply search for the retailer on the website and see what the public rate is. Unfortunately, Cashbackmonitor doesn’t list the portal so you’ll have to do a manual search.
• Capital One Shopping app – the app often has better rates than the portal. These rates are sometimes targeted to select users, but it’s always worth checking.
  • Personally, I hate shopping on a phone and I don’t check the app unless I hear about an increased offer. I also hate using portals on a phone since I’m never sure that the tracking is working properly as it goes from one app to another. My fear here is probably baseless – I assume the same technology that works within a browser can work seamlessly from one app to another, but I still feel unsure. I’ve also always wondered whether our Amazon shopping links work when people click them from the browser and it opens up in the Amazon app. Again, I assume it does but don’t really know much. Hopefully readers can chime in below with their experience using apps for portal tracking.
• Capital One Shopping extension – sometimes the browser extension might have an increased offer that’s not showing in the regular portal search. The offer will drop down or you can click on the extension button to see what they are offering.
  • That leads to the next Capital One portal hack – cause yourself to get targeted with Search. By searching for specific products or at specific retailers, the portal will very often send you a targeted increased offer for that merchant soon-after.
  • There are three ways to let them know you’re interested in a specific merchant/product:
    1. By clicking through the portal to a specific merchant and then waiting without purchasing.
    2. By searching within the shopping portal for a certain retailer. It’s possible that this let’s them know you’re interested in a merchant.
    3. By having the browser extension on they can track you around the web and see what you’re interested in. I think this last one works the best, and many people get excellent offers without having to think about it. (Of course, only if you’re comfortable from a privacy standpoint.)
  • You’ll get that targeted offer sent to your email or in the browser extension or in the ‘Filters’ (more on ‘Filters’ below).
• Capital One Shopping emails – they’ll frequently send out emails with special increased offers. (As mentioned above, I believe these targeted offers usually come as the result of a search.)
• Capital One Shopping email footer – this is the same as the email, but I’m just highlighting here to look below the main body of the email where Capital One sometimes throws in more targeted deals and offers.
  • Before shopping online, I’ll search my gmail for ‘capital one <insert name of store>’ to see if there are any targeted offers in an email body or email footer.
• Homepage Filters – On your Capital One Shopping homepage, there is a ‘Filters’ tab (top-right) which lets you filter the portal for ‘Events’, ‘Exclusive Offers’, ‘Popular Deals’, etc. There used to be a way to filter by store names and I would find terrific offers there, but that seems to have gone away.
  • I only recently learned from MPD about the increased offers which show on the ‘Exclusive Offers’ tab. I found some absolutely incredible targeted offers in that tab. You can also try filtering by ‘Event’s or ‘Exclusive Deals’ or ‘Popular Deals’ and see if there’s anything interesting. Thus far the ‘Exclusive Offers’ is the one that’s worked best for me. (Always use CTRL+F to find anything on the page, though you might have to scroll down a bit as well to ensure all the offers have loaded.)

Notes

A few important notes regarding these targeted offers:

• The email offers often have a dollar limit, typically it’s $250 cashback. This only really matters for very large purchases.
• Don’t click through a lower Capital One Shopping link; even after you are targeted for a higher offer, you need to complete the purchase using the dedicated link. If you subsequently click through the regular portal link it will override your increased offer.
• Often the targeted offer will mention earning a higher rate on a specific product. In reality, you just click through the link to that specific product and proceed to shop any product from that retailer and earn the increased rate.
• The email offers are often confusing where they’ll offer you an increased cashback rate on a specific product which does not actually earn cashback. For example, they might send you a special email offer to earn 5% back at Best Buy and they’ll highlight the iPad which you were browsing on Best Buy the day before. But in reality, Apple products don’t earn rewards from Capital One Shopping. In other words, their tracking systems don’t incorporate the portal terms into the targeted offer – they just see you looking for a certain product and target you to earn an increased rate on the website, subject to portal terms. This leads to a confusing situation where the email literally only mentions earning an increased rate on an iPad from Best Buy, whereby in reality the email offer will be valid for the increased rate on anything else at Best Buy, but not the iPad. Hopefully this makes sense.
• One additional note: separate from the Capital One Shopping portal, there are also Capital One Offers found within your Capital One login. These offers are only for those with a bank account or credit card from Capital One, and this is completely unrelated to the Capital One Shopping portal. Sometimes the offers found in Capital One Offers via the login are better than the offers found on the shopping portal. Also, those rewards are earned as actual cashback whereas the Capital One Shopping rewards are only redeemable for gift cards, as discussed above.

Final Thoughts

There are lucrative opportunities with the Capital One Shopping portal, though we’d recommend it more for the hobbyist who is willing to track the various systems, rather than the average user who wants a simple portal to clickthrough before shopping. I’ll use the portal selectively for the best offers, and I’ll click elsewhere when their offerings are more average; I prefer getting cashback payment over gift card payment.

We very frequently get comments or emails about excellent offers from Capital One Shopping. People don’t usually realize that the offer is targeted specifically to them based on their search patterns or whatnot. For that reason I don’t post about these offers unless many people send them in. As noted above, if you see someone mention a great Capital One Shopping offer, there are ways to make it more likely for you to get targeted as well.