The Kessel Run only for the online store?

It used to be that when you purchased things in the web store you got a discount. 

Now there is no more discount: folks spending money in the web store pay exactly the same price as in-game. In exchange for cancelling the discount, they're giving some bonus rewards through the Kessel Run feature. Exactly how useful this bonus currency will be remains to be seen. It's unlikely to impact me at all. 

As for why the discount once existed and the Coaxium bonus currently exists, that's because they want you to log into the store every day. They're trying to make that enticing. In-game purchases are obviously more convenient, so they have to induce people to come to the web store some other way. That way used to be discounts and now it's Coaxium. 

And, finally, why should they want people to log into the store every day. Obviously the reason is money. Can they monetize some of your personal info through the web store in a way that they can't through the game? Probably, but that's not the main motivation. That more important motive is that when you purchase in-game, Apple takes a cut when it happens on one of their devices and Google takes a cut when you're playing through GooglePlay. 

So the "discount" people used to get was just passing on their savings when they got 100% of the money (less the expenses of the web server) vs. 90-something% of the money from in-app purchases. 

Some game developers aren't big enough to justify the programmer time to create their own separate server for in-app purchases, but EA is. This is a multi-billion dollar game, so the % of purchases that Apple and Google take amount to very large total numbers. So the better question isn't why do webstore customers get a bonus program. It's why don't they get a better one?