The Gift Feed, first experiment: Will people scroll and click?

These day's I'm building a small app for suggesting Christmas gift ideas with actual products.

The idea is simple: you access the app, you select who you want to get a present for (relationship, age, interests, gift price range).

Monetization (ideally) would be via affiliate links to the stores that sell these products (getting partners via 2performant.com, as they have plenty of Romanian merchants.

But before I add the monetization, I scraped ~25000 products from 5-6 stores I found, and I am testing the assumption that people who see this in their feed, click on it, go to the website, scroll through products and click on the links that point to the external websites.

I am running a very small paid traffic experiment (3 days with 50 RON, I am getting some traffic, and I also installed Sentry's session replay to see what people are doing in there).

Things I learned:

• even though you have a big "view product on merchant's website" button, people will click on the product title and description multiple times, and then scroll away (I think they expect that to be the CTA).
• the initial persona selector is too complex, even though it contains only 4 steps. Weirdly enough, the most complex one seemed to be a single text input for the age. I now replaced it with some predefined buttons that indicate age ranges rather than exact ones.
• the images look awful as they have very different aspect ratios and backgrounds. I am now working on a tool to remove the backgrounds and adjust the products better in the page, so the whole app has a more unitary feel.
• the product names and titles are all over the place, and I mean, ALL OVER THE PLACE. Most of them are barely unusuable, and a next step would be to use some AI to get a more "human readable" name and description.

It's fun to throw something at the market and watch the market interact with it, in a very rudimentary way, by people who are way outside your bubble.