AliExpress coins are worth about one cent each: 100 coins take $1 off. How to use AliExpress coins is the easy part. You spend them in the app, either on listings that accept them or by swapping them for coupons. Whether they're worth collecting is a different question, and our answer is: spend the ones you already have, and don't organise your day around earning more. A month of daily check-ins adds up to a few dollars, and some of the ways to earn coins can lose you the ones you've got.
What a coin is actually worth
The standard rate is $0.01 per coin, so 100 coins equal $1. Guides from Slickdeals, Supdropshipping, Accio and Promossale all give the same figure, with the caveat that during promotions, when offers stack, a coin can stretch to $0.02 or a bit more. Alitools adds that some sellers set their own coin-to-dollar rate inside their store, so the exact value can vary from one listing to the next.
That one-cent figure is the number to keep in mind for everything below.
How to use AliExpress coins
Open the AliExpress app and tap Coins in the top-left corner of the home screen. From there you have two ways to spend them.
- Direct discount on a listing. The Coins section lists products tagged with an extra percentage off when you pay with coins. Pick one, add it to your cart, and the coin discount is applied automatically at checkout, shown as its own line so you can see exactly how much it took off. One OzBargain user recommends buying with "Buy Now" from inside the Coins section itself, rather than finding the item another way.
- Coupon Exchange. You can also trade coins for fixed-value coupons (Supdropshipping gives $1, $3 and $8 as examples) that work on orders above a minimum spend. Supdropshipping notes that these coupons are not always available and that each customer can only claim a limited number per month.
The direct discount is the simpler of the two. The coupon route is worth checking when you already have a big order in the cart that clears the minimum. If a coupon greys out at checkout, how AliExpress coupons stack explains the usual reasons.
Why you can't find coins on desktop
Because coins are mainly an app feature. Slickdeals puts it plainly: the complete experience, meaning the games, the check-ins and the Coins section, "lives in the app", and the programme works far better there than on desktop. Alitools says coins "are not always visible" on the site in a browser. One guide, Promossale, claims the desktop site and the app work the same way, but three others disagree, so plan on using your phone. If you mostly shop on a laptop, this alone is a reason not to bother collecting.
Do AliExpress coins expire?
Yes. The exact rule, though, is less settled than most guides make it sound.
The best-supported answer is six months, ending on the last day of the month: coins collected on 5 August expire at the end of February. An AliExpress in-app notice in December 2024 announced this change, according to an OzBargain thread from that time, and Slickdeals and Promossale describe the same rule with the same example. Other guides say otherwise. Accio gives "30–90 days", a furniture retailer's help site says 90 days of inactivity, and Alitools describes a fixed cutoff of 31 March the following year. We couldn't read AliExpress's own help page on coins to confirm which is current.
So don't trust any single number, ours included. The expiry date shown next to your balance in the app is the only one that applies to you. Look at it once, and plan to spend coins rather than save them for later.
How you earn coins, and what it adds up to
There are five main sources.
- Daily check-in. The reward grows with your streak. Slickdeals reports 1 coin on day one rising to 16 by day eight, and 433 coins over an unbroken 30-day streak, or about $4.33. Supdropshipping reports a much higher 20–70 coins per check-in. The two guides don't agree, but even the top of that range is under $1 a day.
- Tasks such as searching, browsing deals, following stores and writing reviews, at roughly 1–10 coins each.
- Purchases, with a small rebate on completed orders. One guide puts it at about 1 coin per $1 spent, more during big sales.
- Referrals, worth up to $5 in coupons per successful referral, depending on country.
- Mini-games, which change by season and region. Some cost coins to play, and Slickdeals calls them "low-stakes gambling", since you are betting coins you already earned.
Slickdeals' own verdict is that doing all of it daily nets "a few dollars", which is not life-changing money. Buyers on the OzBargain thread split both ways: one who collects every day reports 40–65% off a lot of products, while another calls coins "useless". The most telling comment is that the "rate of acquisition far exceeds the rate of usage". Coins pile up faster than there's anything you want to spend them on, and the surplus expires.
Are AliExpress coins worth collecting?
For most buyers, no. Grab what's easy and skip the rest.
Worth doing: spending whatever balance you have before it expires, checking the Coins section before you buy something you already wanted, and tapping the daily check-in if you open the app anyway.
Not worth doing: mini-games that cost coins to play, working through task lists for a few coins each, or opening the app every day purely to keep a streak alive. On Slickdeals' figures, a perfect check-in month earns $4.33, about the price of a coffee.
A coin discount doesn't make the price good
This is the part the other guides skip. The coin discount comes off whatever price the seller set. It says nothing about whether that price was competitive to begin with. A listing showing 50% off with coins can still cost more than the same item from another seller with no coin offer at all. One OzBargain commenter calls these "token discount percentages that mean nothing", which is harsh but not wrong.
So before you spend coins on something, compare the final delivered price, after the coin discount and shipping, against two or three other listings for the same item. Are AliExpress discounts real? walks through that check step by step. And a cheap price from a weak store is no bargain: check the seller's rating too.
Checking the listing before you spend the coins
AliScore doesn't touch coins. It doesn't earn them, track them or apply them. What it helps with is the question the coin discount can't answer: is this listing good value in the first place?
On a product page, AliScore gives a 0–10 score with a verdict, and 15% of that score is a Value component that looks at whether the item seems worth what it costs. On AliExpress search results, it adds a Best Deals row that pulls the five highest-scoring products on the page into one strip, so you have a shortlist to compare before you pick the one to spend coins on. The score is a heuristic built from public listing data, not a promise, so still read the reviews. The full formula is on the how-it-works page.
It's free and needs no account. Add AliScore to Chrome.
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