$10 watch every time. There's something to be said for price anchoring and something for nothing and other dirty tricks, but this question seems to get it all backwards.
Also, lol at the review complaining the watch wouldn't arrive in time for his girlfriends birthday or whatever. Nothing says I care quite like free.
Why I want as low S&H as possible compared to product price? Warranty. In the EU you get 2 years of warranty by law. If your product cannot be repaired, you can get your money back.
Now take the above example or take the example where you're unhappy with the product (e.g. you figure out the quality is bad, or a production error you notice) and want to send it back (in NL you'd have 14 days to do that for w/e reason, getting a full refund). If the item was free with an S&H of 12 EUR then you gotta send the product back for w/e S&H. It could be 12 EUR, it could be less. After receiving the item (for which you let them sign or else they claim they never got it back; verification costs extra) they'll issue a refund instead, worth 0 EUR. Of course, 0 EUR is an extreme example but even if the balance is out of the way the danger with relatively high S&H is that your refund is worth too little compared to your S&H.
Result? High S&H items have high failure, and are of low quality.
Of course its GLHF getting your warranty if the store is in Asia. Then again, I wouldn't buy directly from Asia. I'd buy from a shop I could verify is from EU, pref old EEG (Benelux, UK, Germany, France).
Either way, its false advertising to exclude such ridiculously high S&H from the total cost of the product. Customs calculates the price of S&H together with the cost of product anyway so you can't use it to avoid paying tax.
That actually hasn't been my experience, buying from AliExpress and Ebay directly from China. I've had multiple items replaced without having to ship them back or provide any proof. It's true that I don't order anything above ~100€, and I don't expect them to honor a two year warranty anyway, but still, I've had less pushback upon report of failure than on regular shops.
However, if you are using Wet Kopen Op Afstand (which you generally are when you're buying from a Dutch shop and have S&H to The Netherlands) and you want to send the item back (for whatever reason, with a few types of products being excluded like underwear, unsealed CD/DVD, download services, ...) then they'll have to issue a full refund INCLUDING the S&H.
Here's one source on that:
https://www.consuwijzer.nl/thema/koop-op-afstand
"Geld terug De verkoper moet uw aankoopbedrag terugbetalen, ook de bezorgkosten"
And I guarantee you many shops don't refund S&H at their own discretion.
The costs on sending the item(s) back ARE on you btw.
I have a few bucks. It took some time to really understand that value isn't always preceded by a dollar sign. Sometimes, free very much can say one cares. Well, unless you want to get into costs such as caloric inputs.
Really they are trying to convince people that the choice is between a $10 watch that costs $10 (with $2 shipping) and a $30 watch that is free (with $12 shipping).