The only thing better than online shopping, in my experience, is online shopping with a discount. That’s why I signed up for Capital One Shopping: to save a little extra money on the purchases I was already making and having delivered to my door.
Capital One Shopping promised extra savings with no extra work. I just installed the browser extension and let it tell me when I could be getting a better deal. I couldn’t see any downsides to that, so when my Capital One credit card invited me to give it a try, I accepted, and I’m glad I did!
What Is Capital One Shopping?
Capital One Shopping is an easy way to save money when shopping online. It’s available as a browser extension for desktop or as a mobile app for iPhone and Android. With Capital One Shopping, you can find promo codes, discounts, and a low price for the item you’re considering — no matter what you’re looking for.
How Does Capital One Shopping Work?
Capital One Shopping is incredibly easy to use: After you sign up, you just shop like normal and Capital One Shopping will help you out. It automatically applies the coupon codes at checkout and alerts you to price drops on things you’ve shopped for and purchased.
To create an account, go to Capital One Shopping’s website to begin the sign-up process. The site will walk you through a few questions during its onboarding process. You can skip some of these, though.
The site will ask you for your name, zip code, and whether you have Amazon Prime (I do).
That’s it! Once you’ve created an account, you can check out their featured offers and trending deals, as well as other selected deals and discounts from the home page.
You can also use the mobile app to sign up and to browse, and if you connect your debit and credit cards, you get access to local rewards, too.
If you install the extension on your browser (I’m using Chrome), you enable Capital One Shopping to help you find deals during your regular browsing. For example, when you’re shopping, Capital One Shopping will alert you to any available promo codes and special offers via a little dialog box that pops up. You can test codes right then and there to see if you’ll save at that retailer.
It works on regular store sites and bigger marketplaces such as Amazon, too.
For example, during my hunt for a litter box, I found one on Amazon I liked for $17.42. Capital One Shopping confirmed that I wouldn’t find it cheaper anywhere else. I could add it to my cart knowing I wasn’t missing out on a better deal. Plus, if the price dropped before I bought it, Capital One Shopping would alert me so I could jump on it.
How Much Does Capital One Shopping Cost?
Capital One Shopping is completely free to use. There’s no cost for the app or the browser extension.
However, whenever I use a service or product that’s free, I consider the real payment to come in the form of my data. Capital One Shopping may not be getting my money, but they are learning a lot about my shopping habits when I allow the app to see what I’m shopping for.
Get Capital One Shopping here.
Capital One Shopping Features
Capital One Shopping is an incredibly powerful little tool, when you consider everything it can do.
Automatic Coupon Codes
A huge time-saver is Capital One Shopping’s coupon function. Instead of Googling “[Name of store] promo code” and manually trying a ton of coupon codes yourself, Capital One Shopping scans the internet for codes, using crowdsourcing to find ones that that will work and applying them each to your shopping cart until it finds a winner. The whole process takes seconds and you don’t have to do a thing: It’s all automatic.
If you like, you can turn the automatic feature off and only use “search for codes” using the Capital One Shopping button when you want to, if you don’t like the dialog box popping up every time.
Get Rewards in the Form of Credits
If you’ve used other cash back and reward apps such as Rakuten (formerly Ebates), you may be familiar with how this feature works. Some items or stores offer cash back, either a dollar amount or a percentage of your order, with certain purchases. At Capital One Shopping, your credit accumulates until you redeem it in the form of a gift card.
Universal Product Search
Sometimes you know what it is you want to buy, but you’re just not sure which store offers the most discounts. You can use Capital One Shopping to search for a product across a number of stores, including Amazon and Walmart, and then compare prices, delivery, and shipping. You can even save an item to your watchlist if you’re not ready to buy yet.
Price Drop Alerts
If you’ve been considering a purchase — or bought something you might want to buy again — price drop alerts will let you know when the price comes down. You can let the extension work just by browsing products, or you can add individual items to your watchlist to track the price.
My Experience Using Capital One Shopping
For the most part, I’ve enjoyed using the browser extension. I find it helpful to see if I could be getting a better deal somewhere else — even if I don’t end up taking advantage of it, whether for shipping reasons, convenience, or some other factor. It helps me know I’m getting a good price, and I really love the automatic promo codes. I hate trying to search for a code that works and finding it invalid; Capital One Shopping does it way faster than I can do it by hand, and I’ve been having tons of luck with it finding ones that work.
I’m less excited by the credits feature. Even though I’ve been using the app for six months, I’ve only racked up $1.83 in credits — probably because my purchases have been small things like toiletries, or from stores without a rebate deal.
Also, when I tried to redeem my $1.83 for a gift card, I got an error message — well, several, actually. It wouldn’t let me enter $1.83 as a gift card amount, nor $1, nor $2, saying they weren’t valid amounts. Then I noticed the fine print said the value of the gift cards started at $5, so I entered $5, but then the site told me the gift card couldn’t be worth more than double the value of my accumulated credits.
So, for now, I have earned $1.83 in credits that I don’t have access to. I’ll have to make a few more purchases to have enough to redeem them via gift card.
Who Is Capital One Shopping Best For?
Deal Hunters
If you’re the kind of person who hates to overpay for something and loses sleep knowing you missed out on a discount, you’ll probably like the savings you get with this app. By showing you the price of an item at different stores, it essentially removes the guesswork out of wondering whether you overpaid for something or left money on the table.
Busy People
If you’ve got a lot on your plate, you can’t afford to waste time comparison shopping. It’s a never-ending task, because there’s always one more store to check, and prices seem to change frequently, too.
I also get tired of my email inbox filling up with store promotions and coupons that I have to keep track of, and it’s all just a pain to manage — but the other option was paying the full retail price on the first product I found, which didn’t feel great, either. I appreciate being able to skip the store mailing lists and the lengthy price comparisons and let Capital One Shopping inform me of discounts and deals.
Crowdsourcers
I find that, especially with coupon codes, it pays to have a network you can count on. Other sites that promise coupon codes were full of outdated ones that didn’t work, and even the codes with ratings weren’t valid more often than not. But Capital One Shopping is able to rely on its own data of which codes worked recently and which didn’t, and then match them against your shopping cart. It’s much more accurate.
Get Capital One Shopping here.
Who Shouldn’t Use Capital One Shopping?
In-Store Shoppers
If you’re an infrequent online shopper, you might not see the need to install yet another app or browser extension for the rare times you make a purchase. However, you might still get use out of the mobile price comparison tool, which lets you scan a product in the store to pull up prices at other locations.
Privacy Defenders
Capital One Shopping uses the information it collects to build a more robust algorithm and better service, but if you feel sketchy about sharing some of your personal information and your browsing history, you won’t like this tool.
