Capital One Shopping Review: Free Tool to Help You Comparison Shop Online

Overall Ranking

4.5/5

Overview

Price

5/5

Ease of Use

5/5

Features

4.5/5

Security

3.5/5

Capital One Shopping (formerly Wikibuy) helps you comparison shop online and in stores, plus you can get rewards just for shopping. Find out if it could help you save money.

TJ Porter

Editor's Note

You can trust the integrity of our balanced, independent financial advice. We may, however, receive compensation from the issuers of some products mentioned in this article. Opinions are the author's alone. This content has not been provided by, reviewed, approved or endorsed by any advertiser, unless otherwise noted below.

Disclosure – Capital One Shopping compensates us when you get the Capital One Shopping extension using the links provided.

Lots of people shop online. It’s hard to beat the convenience of buying things from your couch and waiting for them to arrive at your door. Often, you can even find deals online that aren’t available in stores.

One great way to save money while shopping online is to comparison shop, but it takes time and effort to compare prices from different online stores. Capital One Shopping (formerly Wikibuy) is an app that does comparison shopping for you, helping you locate the same product in multiple places.

What is Capital One Shopping?

Capital One Shopping is an app offered by Capital One, the bank and credit card issuer. You can add the app to your web browser and use it to help you compare deals on all the things that you buy online. Once you’ve added the app to your browser, you’re ready to start shopping. The app automatically informs you if there’s a better deal available on a different site.

Capital One Shopping also helps you save money in other ways, applying coupon codes and giving you rewards points that you can use toward perks like gift cards. Best of all, Capital One Shopping is completely free to use.

Product Features

Capital One Shopping has plenty of features to help you save money.

Price Comparison

Once you install Capital One Shopping on your browser, the app tracks your online shopping. It crowdsources product prices from the millions of Capital One Shopping users to create a database of prices on the internet.

When you search for a product on Amazon, Capital One Shopping notes the price of that product. If another Capital One Shopping user has bought the same product from another store, Capital One Shopping compares the prices and notifies you if it’s cheaper on another site. Because Capital One Shopping has millions of users, it might have information about dozens of other websites selling that product which may direct you to a less expensive option for the same product.

Your shopping also helps other Capital One Shopping users. If you buy something at a great price and another Capital One Shopper goes to buy that product, Capital One Shopping will automatically notify them of the great price you found. You help other shoppers while other shoppers help you.

Automatic Couponing

Online merchants often offer coupon codes that customers can use to save some money on their purchases. The problem is that they often distribute the codes through myriad social media channels, e-mail lists, and other methods. It’s hard to find the coupon codes and often, they don’t work, meaning you’ve wasted time finding and inputting the codes.

Capital One Shopping keeps track of the coupon codes that Capital One Shoppers have successfully used and automatically inputs them for you. If one or more of the codes works, Capital One Shopping automatically uses the one that will save you the most money.

Price Drop Notification

Capital One Shopping keeps track of the things you look at or purchase online. If the price of a product drops, Capital One Shopping lets you know so that you can jump on the deal.

Even if you’ve already purchased the product, some credit cards and merchants offer price protection, meaning you can put some of the money that you spent back in your bank account.

Rewards

You can link your credit cards with Capital One Shopping to unlock local offers. Occasionally, Capital One Shopping will partner with local merchants to give its users rewards when they shop. For example, you might see an offer to get 5% back when you eat at a nearby restaurant. All you have to do is add the offer to your account and pay for the meal with your linked card.

Capital One Shopping pays those rewards to you in the form of Capital One Shopping credits, which you can use to buy gift cards to popular stores like Groupon, eBay, or Staples.

Universal Search

To start your comparison shopping for a specific product, you can search for it directly on Capital One Shopping’s website. Capital One Shopping will search its database to help you locate a possible vendor discount and direct you right to the purchase page.

You can also use this feature when you’re shopping in a store. If you download the Capital One Shopping app to your phone, you can use the phone’s camera to scan a product’s barcode. Capital One Shoppingautomatically compares prices from the best online and physical retailers to let you know if you’re getting a good deal.

Pricing and Fees

One of the best things about Capital One Shopping is that there is no cost to install the app and no fee to use it. It claims that using Capital One Shopping can help you save money, and there’s no real risk of trying it out because you never have to pay for the service.

Even if you’re skeptical that Capital One Shopping can help you save, there’s no reason not to give the app a try.

Signing Up

Signing up for Capital One Shopping is easy. You can start by visiting the Capital One Shopping website and installing the browser add-on or downloading the app to your phone. Once you’ve done that, you’ll have to provide some basic information:

• Your name
• Your zip code (to help it calculate shipping and taxes)
• Whether you have Amazon Prime (to help it account for shipping times and costs)
• E-mail address
• Password

The app will also ask you to enter some of your favorite stores and provide estimates of your online spending, but you can skip these steps.

Once you’ve done that, which takes less than five minutes, you’re ready to start using Capital One Shopping.

Synchronization

Capital One Shopping syncs your data between the phone app and the web browser effectively. You can easily search for items and view your search history through both. The phone app and browser also share a watchlist so you can add items to the list from anywhere.

All you have to do is make sure that you use the same e-mail address and password on each device.

Security

Capital One Shopping is offered by Capital One, a major bank and credit card provider. While the app does have to track your shopping habits to effectively track the discounts you may be eligible for, your information is protected by powerful encryption.

Capital One Shopping does state that it collects and stores the following information on users:

• User-provided information
• Cookies and automatically-collected information
• Location information
• Payment information
• Transaction data

If you’re very security and privacy-conscious, it’s worth understanding the information you’re giving up before installing the app.

Mobile Support

Capital One Shopping has great mobile support. The app is available both through Apple’s App Store and on Google Play, so you can install it on almost any smartphone on the market.

The iOS app has a 4-star rating out of 5 while the Android version has 2.8 stars out of five. Still, both apps are effective and let you search for discounts, which means you can easily use the service while you’re on the phone.

Support and Customer Service

Capital One Shopping is a relatively simple application, so it offers bare-bones customer support.

If you have any issues, you can visit the app’s knowledge base to get answers to frequently asked questions. If you need further assistance, you’ll have to e-mail the Capital One Shopping support team. There is no option for phone or live chat support.

Pros & Cons

Capital One Shopping Alternatives

Capital One Shopping isn’t the only app that helps you do comparison shopping online. If you don’t think Capital One Shopping is for you but want to try a similar app, consider these alternatives.

Swagbucks

Swagbucks is an app that helps you earn rewards while you shop online. Unlike Capital One Shopping, Swagbucks won’t help you comparison shop, but it does offer the chance to earn extra cashback when you use it to click through to your preferred online stores.

Like Capital One Shopping, you can also install Swagbucks as a browser extension and on your phone to get automatic prompts to activate rewards, making it easy to earn.

ShopSavvy

ShopSavvy is a smartphone app that helps you comparison shop while you’re in a store. Just open the app and scan the barcode of any item you want to buy. The app automatically finds online and local retailers that sell the same product and tells you where the best deal is.

You can also set the app to notify you of price drops and sales so you can buy at the perfect time to save money.

FAQs

Is it safe to use Capital One Shopping?

Yes, Capital One Shopping is a legitimate app offered by a major bank and credit card issuer. There’s no cost to install the app, so there’s no risk that you’ll pay a fee for a program that doesn’t save you any money. The privacy conscious may worry about the data that Capital One Shopping collects, but the app uses powerful encryption software. It’s up to you whether the data it collects is a deal breaker.

Are other apps better than Capital One Shopping?

There are a lot of online shopping apps out there. It’s hard to say for certain which is the best because each might work better in different situations. The good news is that you can sign up for and use more than one of these apps at the same time, using whichever offers the best deal for each transaction.

Can you stop using Capital One Shopping?

Yes, you can uninstall Capital One Shopping if you want to stop using it. On your phone, you can uninstall Capital One Shopping just like any other app. If you install Capital One Shopping on your computer’s web browser, you can remove it by opening the settings menu, navigating to your installed extensions, and clicking the remove button.

Who is Capital One Shopping For?

Capital One Shopping is designed for people who shop online. It can help you find discounts whether you shop online daily or rarely.

Capital One Shopping also works for people who do all their shopping in person thanks to the universal search function built into the phone app. Anyone who does any shopping at all can use Capital One Shopping to save money.

Bottom Line

Capital One Shopping is a powerful app that crowdsources pricing information from millions of online shoppers. By taking advantage of this powerful tool you have a chance of saving money. There’s no cost to use the app, so there’s no risk if you want to give it a try.