There’s an entire ecosystem of Facebook-tier repetitive browser games that are designed to keep you tapping for hours as you chase tokens you can exchange for AE coins or coupons. Actually, the main point is to get you to make impulse buys from within the games themselves
The games all use different tokens and naturally run on slowly regenerating energy. If you run out energy, you can get more by exchanging some of your coins or tokens, browsing products on AE, opening another game, or by ordering something for a large energy boost
Simply buying stuff normally on AliExpress doesn’t give you game tokens or energy, you need to directly buy an item from a listing the game shows you for it to count
Every single game also has a battlepass type deal with dailies and weeklies to complete for even more tokens
All of this started when Halo 2 introduced XP into online shooters 
the coupons work, but they’re limited time. so it encourages you to impulse buy something so the coupon doesn’t expire. usually has a minimum purchase cost to use it too, so you have to spend more than you save
I didn’t know that but I’m not surprised. I haven’t really delved too deeply into the minigames but I do use the coin system since they can actually come in handy and getting them doesn’t require grinding shitty minigames (The coins also expire on a six month timer)