At Department of Play, we love shopping on AliExpress, from retro console mods and arcade hardware to office equipment and clothes. But recently we’ve become fascinated by its complex web of games, which have their own mature economy that backs out to real dollar value. This is not just your typical gamification with a progress bar and a few badges, but several fully-featured mobile games connected by both real and virtual economies. It is equal parts amazing and bewildering.

Like every business, games share the perennial problem of acquiring and retaining users. But uniquely the games industry has the luxury of experimenting with novel solutions that are fun and deeply human. And over the last couple of decades we’ve found and refined patterns that work. It makes sense then for other industries to embrace these mechanics.

Arguably the most radical attempt to address retention in recent years has come from developers opting to financially rewarding players for their engagement:  From ZBD powered’s microreward games and bigger play-to-earn experiments, to portals, like Rewarded Play and Mistplay, filling the user acquisition vacuum. But AliExpress has flipped this paradigm, by bringing the games.

AliExpress’s games experiment is a messy blueprint for an exciting future. Here, games can become an integrated part of not just retailers, but any consumer facing business. It figures out how to reward and retain customers through playful experiences. 

If you work in games, a retailer or any B2C business, sleeping on how AliExpress is quietly shaping the future of shopping may be a mistake. So let’s break down how this currently works, what the offering is trying to achieve, how it could be improved and crucially, where all of this goes next.

What is AliExpress?

AliExpress is a Chinese crossborder direct-to-consumer retailer i.e. it sells items from China to almost anywhere outside of China. Sitting somewhere between Amazon and eBay, it offers a staggering range of products, from the mainstream to the infinitely niche, often available directly from the manufacturer at a low price.

What makes AliExpress unique is its focus on algorithmic product discovery; the app constantly funnels users to a never-ending list of products, dynamically curated by their purchase, search, clickthrough and basketing actions. Buy an Android tablet, expect to see chargers, pens, cases, and keyboards on your front page. These tailored feeds work so well because of the huge range of novel and niche products available, with over 2.5 billion product listings, compared to Amazon’s 600 million. If you’re into it, AliExpress sells it.

The AliExpress app has become the most popular ecommerce option in Russia and now claims to reach over 150 million buyers across 51 countries. It is an offshoot of the Chinese megacorporation Alibaba Group which started as a B2B retailer in 1999, but has since expanded into various logistics, cloud, payment and AI services.

AliExpress pioneered a retail style which has since been adopted by competitors such as Temu, Shein and TikTok Shop. These new retailers are spending and growing aggressively, but we believe AliExpress’ extensive use of games is a unique superpower.

The Games of AliExpress

There are currently seven games featured on AliExpress listed under the Play & Earn page of the app:

• Daily Lucky Wheel: A simple daily spinner that rewards players with Game Points.
• Pinball Mania: Reminiscent of redemption arcade coin rolling games, players buy balls with Game Points that they roll over a board. Where they land determines prizes including boosts for other games, Game Points and discount vouchers.
• Otter’s Treasure: Classic tile matching with a rather aggressive difficulty curve.
• CapyBistro: A simple plate stacking puzzle game that feels similar to solitaire and Hexa Sort. Our research showed no mechanically identical game, so this may be an original design.
• GoGo Match: A feature-packed match-3 in the Candy Crush mould, with bespoke levels, boosts, live events and even character customisation.
• Merge Boss: A classic mobile merge experience, with a Playrix-style isometric expansion meta layer. This is the most appropriately themed game, with players creating and selling tech and homeware products from their ever expanding stores.
• Prize Land: A comparatively simple clicker experience, where players collect water and use it to grow a tree in order to receive an almost free item.

It is worth noting that not all games get the same billing. Merge Boss and GoGo Match are the most fully featured and offer the most benefits. Otter’s Treasure and Capy Bistro are classic mobile style games but with light meta, offering little reward. Daily Lucky Wheel and Pinball Mania are very light casino type experiences. 

How each of these games reward and interact with each other and the shopping experience is complex, and governed entirely by a unique economy.

The Play-to-Earn Economy

There are two main currencies that are integral to AliExpress’s games portfolio:

• Game Points: These are rewarded both in games and via the Play & Earn page’s missions. They are exchanged for Coupons that give discounts for purchases, with or without minimum spend.
• Coins: A more widely used currency within AliExpress that can be gained and spent without ever interacting with games. Users can gain Coinsin games, but also by buying items or completing tasks, such as viewing a list of sponsored products. Each Coin has an effective $0.01USD value.

Each currency has their own page: ‘Play & Earn’ page for Game Points and ‘Coins’ page for Coins. Additionally, Merge Boss has its own Credits currency that at certain times (seemingly outside of app-wide sales) can be exchanged for shopping credits.

The Play & Earn page acts as a hub of all games, offering users daily missions to complete for Game Points. This is also where Game Points can be exchanged for Coupons that give dollar-value discounts on product purchases.

The Coins page links only to Prize Land, Merge Boss and GoGo Match, with only the latter two rewarding Coins. The amount of Coins in GoGo Match and Merge Boss is limited daily and indicated on their icons. The majority of the page is instead dedicated to a daily login reward at the top, followed by an endless algorithmic feed of products offered with varying discounts via Coins below.

Each Coin has an effective $0.01USD value and can be used to gain discounts on certain products. For example, if buying a screwdriver offered at $10USD at a 40% discount, the user would need 400 Coins to get the maximum discount. However, if they only have 200 Coins, then they would only receive an effective 20% discount of $2.

Both Coins and Game Points can act as a form of in-game hard currency, with various games offering sinking options. For example, in GoGo Match players can exchange Coins for boosts. This means players can earn Coins in one game and leverage those in another to earn Game Points. These can then be exchanged for Coupons to purchase products at a discount, which then would reward the player more Coins.

As Coins have an almost tangible value, earning them is capped at 40 coins per day with GoGo Match and Merge Boss (although occasionally some mechanics can reward additional Coins). Alongside the daily login bonus, which reaches 60 Coins per day, players can earn 140 Coins (or $1.40USD) total per day, without purchase. This may appear incredibly generous, but the reality is that their upside is limited.

There is ostensibly no pattern to the available Coin discounts, with savings commonly between 1% and 40%, but occasionally as high as 60%. It’s reasonable to assume that sellers offer discounts at a rate of their own discretion as purchase incentives. It’s unclear whether AliExpress compensates sellers for Coins used in a discounted purchase, but it’s clear that the discounts can be meaningful.

This means that Coin supply can be generous, because they’re ultimately converting a purchase. But if they are too abundant, they lose their meaning, as users will only make purchases that are discounted with Coins and their conversion power is weakened. So, this balance is finding a pinch point; the level of supply where a resource’s usage becomes entrenched but is scarce enough to still be worth chasing.

Anecdotally, playing these games meant that every few days there was a meaningful discount on an item of around $10-20USD. Indeed, once discovering Coins it became our default way of bargain hunting: Placing an item of interest in the basket meant that any Coin discount could be uncovered on the Coins page.

With Coins (and less directly Game Points) being dollar-backed, rather than percentage-backed, the incentives do not scale to larger purchases. This means users are encouraged to make small purchases, in the tens of dollars range, regardless of their means. This dollar-backing also means that users should hold off making larger purchases as they build up their Coins and Game Points.

By now, it’s fair to say you may be confused by all of this. The complexity is likely in part from experimentation and in part by design. The AliExpress games offering has grown and morphed over the years and those of you who have managed older products will know that product debt stacks quickly; previous experiments or mechanics get grandfathered in, difficult to remove with live users active in them.

However, obfuscating the systems for players, can make maximising play difficult. Casual players may trip on to the various entry points and use the currencies inefficiently to make impulse purchases, but for the hardcore, the economy’s surface area means there is a lot to optimise. Indeed there is an entire subreddit dedicated to efficiently playing these games, which further drives retention via social engagement. With money at stake it is no surprise that there are lots of people seeking to fill the knowledge gap, both in creation and consumption.

There is also a cultural divide between Asia and the West, with Western audiences embracing complex game systems less willingly. The assumption is that the AliExpress games and their associated economies are designed by Chinese developers who are imitating Western mobile hits (Candy Crush, Merge Mansions etc), but imbibing them with a complexity that’s traditionally off-putting for that very same audience.

Another disadvantage of such a convoluted economy is that there is a lot of surface area that needs to be managed. An exploitable Coin source, a bot-able game and/or an unexpected stacking of discounts could have significant financial impact for AliExpress and its sellers. The economic stakes are simply higher than they are in a regular game. So it begs the question: what is AliExpress getting that makes the risk and dev cycles worth it?

What is AliExpress Trying to Achieve?

Based on the prominence and frequency at which mechanics appear, we believe that the priority is roughly as follows:

• Retention: These are full-blown games that have progression systems, including daily login rewards and building meta games. But even for the most dedicated bargain hunter, optimising the games on a daily basis becomes key to accessing the best prices on the app. This creates habitual use, where users must pass the very distractible front page algorithmic feed to reach the games. Simply being in the app creates purchase intent.
• Purchase Conversion: The discounts offered by the various game mechanics can be considered purchase catalysts. Working towards discounts that often have near expiration dates triggers loss aversion. Players must make a purchase or lose what they have gained.
• Product Discovery: Currencies are often rewarded for simply spending time looking at a generated list of products. The intention being a user discovers a product they like and either add it to their cart or make a purchase there and then.
• Algorithm Training/Purchase Intention:Users are often rewarded simply for searching a keyword or tapping on an item. This is about understanding purchasing intention: What is this user thinking about buying next? What types of products get them to click through? This refines the products offered on the front page, the bundle page and other algorithmic feeds.
• Coin Sinking: Some games allow Coins to be exchanged for items, such as boosts in Gogo Match. As Coins have a real world value in discounts, sinking them in-game means that they’re not used to lower the price of real purchases. However, this seems somewhat counterintuitive to their use as a purchase conversion.
• Sponsorship Revenue: Users are rewarded for looking at sponsored item feeds that are distinct from the typical algo feeds, in the sense that they are not tailored (or, at least, not as tailored). It appears sellers use these promos to seed new products and it is assumed they pay for that privilege.

Ultimately, retention is king of all metrics and the fullness of the progression vectors and itemisation in these games points towards that being AliExpress’s key aim. However, what is likely a tangential and hard-to-quantify benefit, is sentiment: Simply having players come and play changes their experience.

Why Does It Work?

It might be reasonable to think that the games are simply hoops to jump through, so why doesn’t AliExpress just give these rewards to its users daily? At the heart of this is something like the endowment effect: Because users are expending their time and energy to acquire these rewards they feel they have earned them. They are not arbitrary discounts, but, indeed rewards for effort, so the user should use them to realise the benefits of their effort.

Additionally games release dopamine, resulting in positive sentiment towards the source. This creates a hook for the app to keep users coming back more frequently. AliExpresses games are much like supermarket bread, they are kept at the back and users need to pass by all the other products first, resulting in bigger baskets.

However, the complexity, driven from AliExpresses additive design approach, means the most valuable behaviours are not optimised. This is a benefit for any upstart who can unpick what AliExpress has done and streamline it.

What Could AliExpress Games Do Better?

Determining the success of the games of AliExpress is difficult with any traditional BI tools; these titles contain no IAPs and form just one part of a complex ecosystem of other evolving gamified content (such as ‘Shake & Win’ or its recent influencer team cashback competition).

However, with over a decade of experience on the platform, we’ve witnessed clear evolution and obvious continued investment. We’d estimate that the proportion of users engaging with these games are low (maybe ~10%), but these represent the most engaged and highest repeat spenders. A key factor is that the games remain poorly surfaced and the benefits of play unclear until players begin to use them.

In absence of data, we are going to base our recommendations on the following assumptions:

• The complexity and underexposure of the game economy is resulting in poor uptake.
• The users who do interact with games return more frequently and spend more often.
• The purchases triggered by game rewards are small value, average around $10 USD.
• Acquiring users in the face of aggressive competitors, such as Temu, is increasingly expensive.

To address this, we would recommend:

• Simplify & Surface: Reduce complexity and give more obvious paths to games.
• No-Brainers: Demonstrate the benefits of games by giving new users an obvious early win.
• Make Discounts Percentages: Dollar discounts keep purchases low, whereas percentage discounts encourage users to buy bigger ticket items.
• Open the Economy: Allow external developers to integrate into the economy, rewarding their players and driving new users to the platform.

Simplify & Surface

Simplifying the entire system would be our primary focus – ,reducing to around four games, merging Coins and Game Points into single currency and having a dedicated page, linked from the home page, for games.

On this new page, users would be shown an algorithmic product feed alongside their progression towards a discount on each. Users could then pin products, allowing them to set their own long-term goals.

In addition, players would be able to pin or use their rewards on any product they come across anywhere else in the app, if it offers a game discount.

No-Brainers

Offer users a combination of generous gameplay rewards and heavy product discounts when they first engage with games. For example, have a huge bonus for reaching gameplay milestones approximately 10 minutes into each game, while offering products at a one-time deep discount e.g. 60%.

This creates a positive association with the systems, giving players massive benefits, but more importantly, driving them to a purchase cycle. It helps get new users rapidly over the first purchase barrier which is critical for international shoppers who are potentially nervous about shipping risks.

Temu, for example, does a simple cup and ball trick with discounts, when users first download the app to incentivise this first purchase. However, on-boarding players into a game first gives a greater sense of loss aversion and reciprocity.

Make Discounts Percentages

The absolute (aka dollar-backed) discounts offered by the current systems are problematic in that they encourage small ticket purchases. For example, if a user grinds daily for a week to gain 400 Coins, that is worth $4 USD. This may be exchanged for 40% off a $10 purchase. However, if the currency was worth 40% of any single purchase then the user is incentivised to make the largest purchase they can to maximise their earnings.

Likely margins on AliExpress don’t remain fixed as price increases, but as Coin discounts are already capped at the seller’s discretion per product, moving to a percentage discount seems to only be an upside. This change would mean currencies scale with the player’s purchasing power, triggering bigger average checkouts.

Open the Economy

Mobile discovery and retention is increasingly a problem for AliExpress, just as it is for games in general. The billions being spent annually on driving users to games is painful for developers, who are forever looking at ways to reduce and recoup their costs. However, this struggle presents a huge opportunity for AliExpress to evolve.

Partnering with mobile game developers to put the AliExpress economy in their games is a win-win:

• Developers get to offer their players real world value by rewarding them with Coins, or similar. Anecdotally, we know this is a huge retention boost for games that have implemented comparable rewarded play.
• AliExpress can benefit from the massive traffic mobile games have to drive players to their retail offering. Critically, they will already be incentivised to buy in order to utilise their in-game earnings.

As much as the games offered by AliExpress are passable, they are not on par with the world’s best, where large teams of experienced developers are optimising everything. There is an obvious alignment here which could benefit both parties if they’re able to find the right deals and partnerships.

Games Not Gamification

As we reach late stage maturity in both online retail and mobile games it is increasingly rare to see something truly novel. The games economy of AliExpress, silently growing and morphing over the years into what it is today, is one of the most interesting developments in years.

While the ponzinomics of games like Axie Infinity drift off into memory, it is clear that there is a desire from players to have different relationships with games that have been wholly subtractive to them, constantly hectoring them with monetisation. Players have a near infinite choice of free games, making it hard for them to decide where to spend their time. Putting money in players pockets is a big lure.

By adding games, and not the light-touch gamification of yesteryear, directly into their product, AliExpress is able to offer a rewarding experience that improves their bottom line. Players get games that give them real discounts, and in offering those game gated-discounts, AliExpress gets better retained, happier and more frequently spending users.

The lesson for games is that tangible rewards give you an incredible edge in order to attract players, while retailers and service with paying customers can leverage the positive effects of games to keep players longer and trigger more and bigger purchases.

It is inevitable that more businesses will adopt games, rather than gamification, into their offering, and those that don’t will get left behind.

About the author

Will Luton

Founder at Department of Play |  + postsBio

Department of Play founder and Chief Product Consultant. Will has worked at the likes of SEGA and Rovio, took Angry Birds 2 top 50 grossing and is author of Free-to-Play: Making Money From Games You Give Away.

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