Because that makes your marketing message confusing to the buyer. It seems to me that Asian sellers think it's highly valuable to include a 'free gift'. I've go

Because that makes your marketing message confusing to the buyer. It seems to me that Asian sellers think it's highly valuable to include a 'free gift'. I've gotten many worthless 'free gifts' (in the same package as the order of the actual product (off AliExpress); so there's no advantage like described in the OP). So I conclude that this whole 'free gift' thing really works with their domestic customers, and many sellers are not sophisticated/specialized enough to realize that for Western buyers, they don't gain anything. Under that world view, a) there is no reason to include the 'separate shipping' thing; and b) adding it makes your ad copy look complicated, to the point of discouraging a sale. If you say 'free xxx with every purchase!', that looks like a good thing. But if you have to add qualifications to it (and I don't mean legally required fine print that you don't actually want customers to read, I mean something you want the customer to internalize), it becomes a bad thing that confuses your marketing message. Just my arm-chair speculation - I've wondered about this and similar issues numerous times over the last years though. So many things seem to illogical in that world, yet they must make someone somewhere money somehow.