Capital One Shopping is an extension you can add to your Chrome browser. According to their website, “Capital One Shopping scours the internet for working coupons and promo codes, then applies the best one to your purchase.”<\/p>\n
Actually, COS (Capital One Shopping) claims to save consumers money in three different ways. First it finds and applies coupons to purchases. Second, it compares prices for items at different retailers. And third, it allows you to earn “Capital One Shopping Credits” that can be applied to future purchases.<\/p>\n
The basic idea is pretty cool. COS (Capital One Shopping) goes out and looks for deals\/coupons that apply to your purchase and applies the discount to your purchase when you are checking out.<\/p>\n
Sounds almost too good to be true! But does it work? And are there downsides?<\/p>\n
Obviously there have to be deals or coupons out there somewhere for COS to find. This sounds<\/i> good, but in my (very limited) experience, there are often no deals to be applied to the products I am looking for (for example, at Amazon). <\/p>\n
In a quick survey of the various items I purchased at Amazon over the last couple of months, none of them<\/i> generated a coupon that could be applied when I did a “dummy” purchase of the same product with the extension activated.<\/p>\n
This suggests two or three things\u2026<\/p>\n
First, if you are a merchant with a coupon you may be interested in NOT having your coupon found. <\/p>\n
After all, from the merchant’s point of view the reason you offer coupons is to first, create traffic and second, generate sales that might not otherwise happen.<\/p>\n
But just applying a discount to sales that are already in the bag (at checkout) does neither of these things. You haven\u2019t encouraged a sale. You\u2019ve just given away some money to someone who had already decided to buy the item. It\u2019s like a reverse tip.<\/p>\n
So I suspect merchants will tend to create coupons or deals on more expensive items that you might not otherwise choose. <\/p>\n
This is just speculation, so I would be interested in knowing if your experience has been different (or similar).<\/p>\n
The other negative I’ve seen bandied about is that Capital One Shopping keeps sticking aggravating popups in your face. I didn’t find this to be the case, but it could very well be that I just wasn’t looking for the right items.<\/p>\n
Again, share your experience….<\/p>\n
Another thing COS claims to do is provide you with comparison pricing for the same item at different stores.<\/p>\n
If this seems just a bit too good to be true you would think it would be relatively easy to test. We could just go through the process of buying items at select places, and see how often discounts and useful comparisons actually materialize.<\/p>\n
So we did that with a few items at retailers mentioned by Capital One Shopping. They claim to deal with more than 30,000 eligible retailers. The ones we looked at were Amazon, Lowes, and Home Depot. .<\/p>\n
Here’s what we found: Not much.<\/p>\n
Maybe I lack the appropriate motivation for this kind of research, but I found the results so unimpressive that I just didn\u2019t have the patience to do more than a few tests.<\/p>\n
For example, I looked for Philips Light Bulbs of a certain type. I entered the same product description into three different places: Home Depot, Lowes, and Walmart.<\/p>\n
No messages from COS.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t really know, but part of the problem may be that in all three instances (Home Depot, Walmart, Lowes) the bulbs were available in different packages – 2, 4 or 6 pack. So a \u201ccomparison\u201d is difficult to do.<\/p>\n
In fact this is one pretty consistent thing I found when trying to compare the same product at different stores. You might think a 2 pack of light bulbs is pretty standard. But not really. Everybody seems to have a slightly different package.<\/p>\n
So this brings us back to the question \u201cIs it worth the hassle?\u201d Is it worth installing something like Capital One Shopping for the few times it might actually provide useful information<\/p>\n
My answer is pretty clearly \u201cNo\u201d.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve had a different experience I\u2019d be happy to hear about it in the comments below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Capital One Shopping is an extension you can add to your Chrome browser. According to their website, “Capital One Shopping scours the internet for working coupons and promo codes, then applies the best one to your purchase.” Actually, COS (Capital One Shopping) claims to save consumers money in three different ways. First it finds and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":578,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107,18],"tags":[108,109,110,111],"class_list":["post-576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-coupons","category-price-comparison","tag-capital-one-shopping","tag-coupons","tag-deals","tag-extensions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crosstownpromotions.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crosstownpromotions.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crosstownpromotions.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crosstownpromotions.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crosstownpromotions.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/crosstownpromotions.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":582,"href":"https:\/\/crosstownpromotions.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576\/revisions\/582"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crosstownpromotions.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crosstownpromotions.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crosstownpromotions.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crosstownpromotions.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}