There are few things more scammy than AliExpress “discounts”. I have yet to see a cent of the hundreds of dollars of “savings” they gave or advertised to me.

"random apps" and it's the largest eCommerce company on the planet

When I did customer tech support for a major retailer, we had confused customers calling all the time because they would randomly get price-match refunds they never asked for. They were installing apps that were automatically requesting the refunds by searching their emails for orders and checking the prices on the websites. These people had no idea they had even given these apps permission to read their emails.

You'd be surprised on what general public can go to save $5.

eBay keeps pushing their app with a $5 discount, advertised using a focus-stealing popup interrupting your attempt to give them money, so some people must be taking the bait.

This is not correct. I do not have the app and get tracking for my orders.

Depends on the shipping company, and likely on your location. I get tracking numbers for most but not all shipments

You just have to press the right link on the site and you get the tracking page (despite saying you need the app).

You pay less money in the app.

Companies are not going to hire a mobile dev team to create an app to give you a way to pay them less for a good.

They hire a mobile dev team to create an app to give you a way to hand over data that you otherwise wouldn't, is technically impossible to do through a web browser, and is worth more than the discount that they give you for using the app.

>You get 'coins' for a daily check-in, which are automatically(?) applied as a discount.

This should be illegal

That's definitely a feasible explanation (and the one I would assume to be true for AliExpress).

But there is another, slightly less evil, explanation that I know at least some companies have pushed their apps because of: the thinking is that if you're on their website, there is less friction to open a new tab and search for a lower price from their competitors, than if you're in their app. Obviously it's hardly any different - opening a new app (the web browser) vs. opening a new tab in the app you're already in - but the theory is that there's a slight psychological difference.

Of course I'm not saying that trying to prevent your customers from searching for better deals is a nice thing to do. Just adding that data mining isn't the only reason for some companies to want people to use their apps.

It also all goes to the party, who are the owners of Alibaba (and every other company in China).

Should you ever need someone in a foreign country to do something for you, it's good to have as much information as possible at your disposal about them.