Frugalize your online purchases by searching for promo codes and stacking them with rewards platforms like Capital One Shopping. This can save a ton! After saving and building gift card rewards, I cashed in $100 in Capital One Shopping rewards for Best Buy to buy a Fitbit Air for free to track my sleep and heart metrics.

Thirty seconds to a minute of research before you check out online can save you 10, 20, 30% or more. Most people skip this step because they assume the price shown is just the price. Not always true. Don’t be lazy! It’s worth the quick search every single time.

Here’s the general frugalizer steps for online savings:

• Before you hit “place order,” open a tab and search “[store name] promo codes.” Test those codes in the checkout portal. Or use Capital One Shopping “apply codes” prompt if you have it installed on your computer.
• If nothing else works, go try to find the newsletter pop-up you just X’d out of. Most retailers hand first-time subscribers a code immediately. Subscribe, grab the discount, & opt out later if you don’t want the emails.
• Then check Capital One Shopping for a percentage or dollar amount back (7% back on X retailer for example) to activate (make sure you click activate!). If you have the desktop extension, it can also try to apply codes for you (it may not always land a working one though).
• Strike out on all three? OK… fine. Check out if you need/want to buy it anyway, and move on with your life. Not worth fretting about.

Fair warning: this doesn’t work well at the big e-commerce players like Walmart, Target, or Amazon. So don’t expect too much in those areas.

Promo codes often stack with Capital One Shopping dollars, so that’s double dipping your frugalizer savings! Frugalizer win!

Capital One Shopping has been huge for me lately.
If you’re not familiar with it, the rewards come back as gift card dollars, so it isn’t a straight discount at checkout. You redeem the balance for e-gift cards later. I think of it as a gift card bank that eventually buys stuff for free. And you earn it on purchases you were already making, just with a percentage or dollar amount coming back.

You also pay the way you normally would with Capital One Shopping, so your credit card points still hit if you’re into travel hacking. That means you can triple stack: promo code, Capital One Shopping rewards, and card points. So in theory you can triple-stack rewards (promo code; Capital One Shopping rewards; and credit card points!)

Simply download the Capital One Shopping app on your phone or desktop, search a store before you buy, and it tells you what’s available to start building your gift card rewards balance. You can use this Capital One Shopping referral code to get started (on mobile or your computer)!

• Recently I searched “PetSmart” because I needed a dog bed, and it showed me a great offer. Sometimes it’s 1 or 2%. Sometimes up to 15%, or the deal I used was $15 back when you spend $25, which is 60% back!
• Frugalizer tip: search the item on the Capital One Shopping app and let it sit in your cart overnight. The algorithm tends to send better offers when you don’t buy right away. You also may receive an email saying “Buy this item and get % back or $ amount back!”
• One annoying part is that sometimes they email you a day or two after you’ve already bought an item with a good % or $ back offer. (Sometimes I will re-buy the item and then process a return for the first transaction.)
• Best Capital One Shopping offer that I’ve had so far: $125 back at Sam’s Club when I spent $200 on a toddler bounce house. The thing was about $220 after tax, and we were buying one anyway for summer and a birthday.
• The Capital One Shopping app has limited redemption partners, so ensure that you use the vendors there before you start building up rewards. Other shopping apps may have better shopping partners (pick what works for you). For me, REI, Best Buy, PetSmart, and a few others are good options.
• Always ensure you click “Activate” on the deal because it can go away and never be found again (sometimes it is a limited time). Keep your emails as well if they send you a special email deal just click activate through that email and it will jump over to the app or desktop app to put the item in your cart.

Here’s that Sam’s Club redemption credit on Capital One Shopping – free $125 to bank (below snippet). This deal was an email special after I was browsing for the item and left it in my cart for a couple of days. Patience pays! This purchase credit basically covered my Fitbit Air, noted above! Frugalizer win!

Here’s a recent example of a PetSmart order on Capital One Shopping for $15 back on a $25 order minimum:

I’m fairly new to Capital One Shopping rewards dollars, but I’ve already banked almost $500 in rewards in the last 6 months (an average of almost $100 a month is pretty good in my book- and counting!)

The one downside I have noticed is that the rewards can sometimes be slow to show up.

You need to watch the bigger deals in particular to make sure they post as a credit. That Sam’s Club credit never showed up on its own, so after 90 days I messaged them. (That’s their rule: 90 days to allow for it to process and possibly show up). Typically, you see it show as “pending” within a week, so if you don’t see that under “shopping trips” then something may not have gone right. So it may be a good practice to take screenshots of your Capital One Shopping app with the deal showing on the top as you’re buying it to keep those images for later as proof, such as the “$125 when you spend $200” example. So you can say to their help chat, “This was the deal that showed when I checked out and I activated it.” They then adjust it manually. Mildly annoying, but I was buying the item regardless and just went about my life until I noticed the credit was missing.

Another shopping tip: if you have a rewards credit card, look for unused monthly credits. DoorDash credits, Lyft credits, and similar perks on cards like the Chase Sapphire Reserve reset every month whether you use them or not.

This is really just the frugalizer mindset applied to a checkout page. Before you buy anything new, ask if it is cheaper somewhere else or if you can get a discount code applied or Capital One Shopping (or another shopping platform) deal on the same purchase. Other platforms like rakuten or camelcamelcamel are similar. I don’t think you can stack them, so pick at least one and start saving!

None of these are huge wins on their own. But thirty seconds here for a promo code to save $20 and gift card rewards there add up over time, and that money goes toward what actually matters to you, rather than spending more than you need to ~ To me, the FitBit Air was something that mattered health-wise.

What’s the best shopping deal you’ve found lately?