The Curious Case of Capital One Shopping and Giftcards.com

Giftcards.com in Recent Memory

Since Summer of 2020, shopping portals have had the following language for purchases giftcards.com: “Orders over $2,000.00 max per month per customer are not eligible”. Of course there’s room to drive a truck through that language. For example, here are vague questions that aren’t answered by the text (but I’ve given my own answer based on experience):

Q: What is a customer anyway?
A: Roughly speaking a giftcards.com account. By the way, giftcards.com does basic matching of multiple accounts by a single customer so scale requires more than just a new email address.

Q: What if all of your orders are under $2,000 max per month?
A: You may get lucky and have more than $2,000 in aggregate purchases track, but that’s not a guarantee. Usually $2,000 is indeed the maximum that they’ll pay out on in aggregate.

Q: Is it $2,000 per shopping portal?
A: No. It’s across all portals, with an asterisk described below.

New Kid on the Block

In August of this year, Capital One Shopping started offering 6% cash-back on giftcards.com. Unlike the other portals, it lacks language about a maximum payout of $2,000 per month. Of course, hitters gonna hit and some people went really big on giftcards.com purchases through the Capital One Shopping portal in August, and continued through September and October. What happened with purchase tracking (and was pointed out to me by AllezSport, thanks!):

– August: Everything tracked
– September: Everything tracked and paid out if it was purchased very early in the month. Afterword, purchases over $2,000 were zeroed out sometime in the last week
– October: So far everything is tracking, but I think they’ll also zero out anything over $2,000 before the payout next month

The lesson here? I guess there are two:

• Stop buying giftcards.com cards through any portal after $2,000 in purchases if the portal payout matters
• If giftcards.com appears on a new portal without the $2,000 per month language, go ham early

And an unsolicited piece of advise: Try large purchases with Capital One Shopping, it probably won’t behave the way you think it will.

Have a nice weekend friends!

Sometimes things are bigger than you expect them to be, like this spoon.