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Cash-Back Systems are Broken

Cash-Back Systems are Broken

April 16, 2026
2 min read

Capital One Shopping

If you haven’t heard of Capital One Shopping, you are missing out on some dumb money.

Basically, it’s a browser extension similar to Honey where it tries coupons and such, but it also has Cashback built into it. If you are on a site it’ll throw a “Earn x% back here” which is generally between 5-10% back. But the real deals are the ‘Daily Deals’ which feature things like “$50 back on $50” on sites like Chewy, Ebay, etc.

It also DOES NOT require you to have a Capital One credit card or anything. It’s completely separate.

My prior Chewy Deal:

image.png

My Current Deals:

My Daily Deals

Additionally, if you search a specific product/brand, you’ll often get a cash-back offer on it if you search around. For example, I was looking into a Dell monitor, and while on Amazon, I got an offer saying “Get 30% back on Dell.com”. So I ended up buying from dell and getting 30% back on the same monitor.

Too Good to be True?

This definitely feels like one of those ‘Too good to be true’, and I think it is. I think they are basically dumping lots of money into getting a user-base with data to which they will sell to the highest bidder eventually. But, until that time comes, I plan on milking it for as much as I can.

The other downside is that it’s only redeemable for Gift Cards. However, the gift cards they offer are actually pretty good?

Chewy is Broken

So I have 2 cats, and they go through food pretty fast. If you have animals, you know that Chewy offers near-monthly offers like “Spend $100, get a $30 gift card”. Well, you can stack that with this.

Have a credit card that offers Cash Back on Chewy? You can stack that too.

So for my last 3 Chewy orders:

Order 1:

$120 of Cat Food - $50 off $50 - $10 Cash back via Chase - $30 GC on $100 (Chewy). So I spent ~$30 for $120 of Cat food. A total of $90 back.

Order 2:

~$120 of Cat Food - $37 (31% off via CapOne) - $5 Chase CB - $30 GC off $100 (Chewy). So $72 Cash back.

Order 3:

$100 of Cat food - $25 off $50 (CapOne) - $5 Chase CB - $30 GC off 100 (Chewy). $60 Cash back…

Yeah, it’s kind of broken.

$80 Referral Bonus

What is also crazy is that they are offering a $80 bonus for users to sign up. You literally get a free $80 if you sign up via referral. If that is something that interests you, feel free to use my referral link:

Referral Link

Please ignore my shitty-AI generated Cover Image. I couldn’t find any stock photo that wasn’t dumb