Readers commented with a few helpful tips in using the Capital One Shopping portal, and I thought it worth highlighting. We’ve recently seen numerous excellent offers from the portal. As always, we’ll add the caveat that the rewards are not as good as cash since they only cash out for various gift card brands.
In a separate post we laid out the Numerous Flavors Of The Capital One Shopping Portal. Here, we’ll be discussing specifically the regular online shopping portal, unrelated to having a Capital One bank card or bank login.
We also wrote about Exploring Increased Offers with the Capital One Shopping Portal. Here are a few more tips from readers:
Reader Drew comments:
I’ve been putting a ton of spend on Cap1 Shopping, $4200 in rewards tracked in the last month. Just sharing some of what I do, haven’t had an ineligible or untracked claim yet with this method:
- Consistently view products you like and activate the extension but don’t purchase, Cap1 will target highly escalated offers based on your browsing history.
- Wait for an email containing an exclusive or boosted rate.
- Open an incognito browser and log in to your email.
- Navigate through the email and make the purchase (incognito won’t have the browser extension, that’s okay).
- Ensure any purchase where you need to spend $X is met before taxes and fees are applied. This is the most common reason I’ve seen ineligible orders.
- If the order does not track after the purchase (wait 3 days) cancel the order if you can and retry. I have had a little success with getting them to honor an untracked trip, but it’s not worth the hassle.
Reader RM notes:
Be careful when you cash out. Do a little bit at a time to avoid manual review. I got my account with $3500 in rewards terminated for earning too much cash back (they accused me of buying for resale, which was not true). Took 3 months of negotiating with C1’s lawyers to get the account reinstated. More here.
A few other notes:
- Remember, the email offers usually have a $250 limit or some other limit. The email offers are usually the better offers, but have these limits. Offers directly only the website don’t typically show limits.
- While reader Drew (above) prefers doing these offers incognito, others prefer doing it in the browser that the shopping extension is installs to confirm the higher cashback rate. Just make sure not to click on the wrong cashback amount since it’ll override the increased email offer.
- One reader reports better success when closing out the browser immediately following the purchase.
- Some report that clicking through the email on your phone into the Capital One Shopping app is another way to have good results with tracking.
- Do not click through ‘Spend $X earn $Y’ offers unless you are ready to use it.
- The item/image displayed in targeted offers are generic – be sure to check exclusions.
- Sometimes Apple products are allowed.
- Some suggest not redeeming more than $500 at a time with Capital One Shopping.
- Let us know your own tips in the comments below.
