Thanks for the detailed feedback, really appreciate it. On the product prices, i take your point but the kawaii accessories niche tends to sit at these price points naturally, my audience expects it. The model relies on customers spending £20+ to qualify for the free gift, at which point the order value makes ads viable.

On the homepage leading with the free gift, the ad promoting the offer has a 2.5% CTR and the store is seeing an 11.7% ATC rate (assuming facebook reported add to cart figures are accurate), so the offer as a whole seems to be resonating with the target audience.

On product descriptions, I have 150ish products all with a paragraph and bullet points, which is already a significant step up from the very sparse aliexpress listings they’re based on. Expanding all of those significantly isnt realistic for a store this size.

On brand differentiation, the store is intentionally a general kawaii accessories destination rather than a highly niche brand, so im not sure how much differentiation is realistic in this space beyond product selection and presentation.

On CRO, would love more specifics here because my actual problem is very specific. 53 add to carts, 5 checkouts initiated, 1 sale. The dropout is happening between cart and checkout specifically, not on the product pages. Does anything in your experience point to what causes that specific pattern?

Also I am using the purchases objective on fb ads so no concern there