Link in bio tools compared, from a seller's point of view

You've had a link in bio for eight months and it has never once made you money. People tap it. Some of them even scroll. Then they message you asking how much something costs, and by the time you reply they've gone quiet.

That's not a tool problem yet. It's a category problem. You picked a tool built to point at things, and you've been asking it to sell things.

Here's the short answer, before the detail. The best link in bio tool for selling is whichever one lets a buyer see a price and pay without opening a second app, on the payment rail your buyers already use, at a cost you can actually name. There are only four kinds of product competing for that link, they charge in completely different shapes, and the difference between them at 30 orders a month is a few hundred dollars a year. Gumroad, to pick one with published numbers, was charging 10% plus $0.50 on every sale made through your own link on 6 August 2026, and no monthly fee at all. That is a completely different bet from a $49 subscription, and neither is obviously better until you know your order count.

Four kinds of tool, not one crowded market

Most comparison articles line up eight logos and score them on 40 features. That's useless, because six of the eight aren't trying to do the same job.

The link page. Its actual product is a tidy list of destinations. Some have bolted a store on. The store is usually a second-class citizen inside a product designed for routing, which shows up in small ways: no order status, no way to write bank details, a checkout that assumes card.

The creator storefront. Gumroad, Payhip and the rest. Built for digital goods, priced as a cut of your revenue rather than a subscription, and genuinely good at file delivery and licence keys. They hold the money and pay you out.

The full shop. Shopify, Big Cartel, and the ecommerce platforms proper. Inventory, variants, shipping rules, tax, staff logins, apps. Priced as a monthly fee plus card processing. Overkill for eleven products and exactly right for eleven hundred.

The marketplace. Etsy, eBay, Amazon, Jumia, Meesho. The only category on this list that brings you a buyer. Everything else waits for you to bring one.

A link-in-bio product and a marketplace are not competitors. One sells you a shopfront, the other sells you footfall. Sellers who mix those up spend a year optimising a page nobody visits.

Why there are no Linktree numbers in this article

I tried to open Linktree's own pricing page on 6 August 2026 to quote its plan prices and its cut on sales. The page localises prices by region and did not return figures I could quote with confidence. Same story with Etsy's fee page, eBay's fee page, Beacons and Ko-fi, all of which refused the request or timed out.

So this comparison runs on structure rather than price wherever I couldn't verify a number, and every figure that did survive is dated with the page it came from. If you see a Linktree or Etsy fee quoted in some other comparison article, check the date on it before you plan a business around it. Fees on these products change two or three times a year and most comparison blogs are copying each other rather than the source.

Here is what I could verify, all checked on 6 August 2026:

Product	What it charges	Source
Gumroad	10% + $0.50 per transaction on sales through your own link, 30% on sales the Gumroad marketplace finds you, no monthly fee	gumroad.com/pricing
Payhip	$0/mo with a 5% transaction fee, $29/mo with 2%, $99/mo with none, unlimited products on all three	payhip.com/pricing
Big Cartel	Platinum $15/mo after a 7-day free trial, Diamond $30/mo, plus a free limited plan	bigcartel.com/pricing
Shopify	Basic €19/mo, Grow €56/mo, Advanced €289/mo, Plus from €2,100/mo, with Shopify Payments online cards at 1.7% + €0.25 on Basic and a 2% extra fee if you use a different gateway	shopify.com/pricing, prices shown in euros for my region
Amazon	$0.99 per item sold on the Individual plan, $39.99/mo on Professional, plus category referral fees running from 5% to 45% with most categories in the 8% to 15% band	sell.amazon.com/pricing
Patreon	10% of what you earn, plus processing and payout fees	patreon.com/pricing
PayPal	3.49% + $0.49 on US commercial transactions, plus 1.5% cross-border and a 4% currency conversion spread	paypal.com/us/business/paypal-business-fees

Shopify's page showed me euros because it detects your region. Check yours before you budget in dollars.

The four questions that actually decide this

Forget the feature matrix. A seller decides on four things, and every one of them has a number attached.

What does it take, and from what

A percentage on its own tells you nothing. You need to know the base it's applied to.

Gumroad's 10% plus 50 cents on a $9 ebook is $1.40, which is 15.6% of the sale, not 10%. Percentages with a fixed component always cost more than they look on cheap products, and less than they look on expensive ones. That's why fee comparisons that only quote the percentage mislead everyone selling under $20.

Then check whether the base includes shipping. A marketplace that charges its cut on the total including postage is charging you commission on money you're about to hand a courier. On a ₦12,000 dress with ₦2,500 delivery, a 10% fee on the total is ₦1,450 rather than ₦1,200. Small, until you've done it 200 times.

The full arithmetic, at 10, 50 and 300 orders a month, with the crossover points worked out, is in what a commission actually costs you.

Who holds the money between the buyer paying and you being paid

This is the question almost nobody asks and everybody eventually cares about.

If the tool holds the money, there's a payout schedule, a minimum payout threshold, a hold period on new accounts, and a set of circumstances under which your balance is frozen while somebody reviews something. Those circumstances are in the terms you didn't read. They usually involve a spike in volume, which is to say, the week you have a good week.

If the money goes straight to your own account, none of that exists. There's also nobody to complain to and no buyer protection scheme, which cuts both ways and matters more to your buyer than to you.

Neither is wrong. They're different failure modes. Pick the one whose bad day you can survive.

How long until your first sale

Time to first sale is the most underrated number in this whole category, because it's the one that decides whether you're still doing this in November.

A page you can fill in tonight and post tomorrow gets you a real answer this week. A platform that needs a domain, a theme, a shipping matrix and a tax setting takes a fortnight before you learn anything, and the thing you eventually learn might be that nobody wants the product.

Marketplaces are usually fastest to a first sale because they bring the buyer. Everything else depends on how quickly you can get from empty account to a live link with prices on it.

What the buyer sees in the first three seconds

Open your own link on your own phone, on mobile data, not wifi. Count the seconds until you can read a price.

That number predicts your conversion better than anything in the feature list. If the buyer has to tap through to a second site, or wait for a font to load, or scroll past a bio and four social icons before reaching a product, you're losing people who had already decided to buy. The argument in full is in why your link in bio is costing you sales, and the vendor-neutral checklist for judging any of these products is in what to look for in a selling link.

Nneka in Lagos, 40 orders a month

Nneka sells thrifted denim in Lagos. Jackets at ₦18,000, jeans at ₦11,500, roughly 40 orders in a good month, which is about ₦560,000 of sales. Nearly all of her buyers find her on Instagram, and nearly all of them pay by bank transfer because that's what everyone does and nobody wants to type a card number into a page they've never seen.

Run her through the four options.

A creator storefront at 10% plus a fixed fee would cost her around ₦56,000 a month. It would also be useless to her, because those products are built for digital delivery and card checkout, and her buyers pay by transfer to a Nigerian bank. She'd be paying a tenth of her revenue for a checkout her customers won't use.

A full ecommerce platform at Shopify's Basic tier is affordable against ₦560,000 of revenue. But she has 30 items, no variants, no warehouse, one person packing. She'd use maybe 5% of it, and she'd spend two weekends setting it up.

A marketplace would bring her buyers she doesn't have. She has 6,000 Instagram followers and a comment section that fills up when she posts. Those are her buyers already. She'd be paying commission on customers she found herself, which is the single most expensive mistake in this category and is covered properly in when a marketplace beats your own shop.

So she wants the boring answer: a page with her 30 items and prices on it, bank details on the order screen, and a WhatsApp handoff for the buyers who want to ask about sizing first. Cost to her: nothing on the money, because nobody's touching it. Her real cost is the twenty minutes a day she spends checking her bank app and matching transfers to orders, which no tool in any of these four categories removes.

That twenty minutes is the honest cost of the no-commission route, and it's a cost most comparison articles pretend doesn't exist.

Where each category is genuinely the right answer

Pick a link page if you're not really selling, or you're selling one thing occasionally, and what you mostly need is a tidy set of destinations. Nothing wrong with that. Don't pay for commerce features you won't use.

Pick a creator storefront if you sell digital files, you want licence keys and download limits handled for you, and you'd rather pay a percentage than a subscription because your volume is lumpy. Payhip's $0 plan with a 5% fee, verified 6 August 2026, is a genuinely reasonable place to start if your buyers pay by card. At $500 a month of sales that's $25, and you've spent nothing to find out whether the product sells.

Pick a full ecommerce platform if you have real inventory, more than a couple of hundred SKUs, staff, or shipping rules that vary by weight and destination. This is a real answer and it's the right one more often than link-in-bio vendors like to admit. When Shopify is the right answer makes that case properly rather than as a token concession.

Pick a marketplace if you have no audience. If nobody follows you and nobody's waiting for your posts, the prettiest storefront in the world is a shop on a street with no road leading to it. Marketplace fees compared, with the stacking effects that make the headline percentage misleading, is in marketplace fees compared.

Pick a link that is itself the shop if your buyers already come from social, your order volume is real but not enormous, and your payment rail is a local one that card-first products don't handle well. Bank transfer in Nigeria, UPI in India, GCash in the Philippines, M-Pesa in Kenya, cash on delivery almost everywhere in Southeast Asia.

Sailo's honest position in this comparison

Sailo is in that last category, and it does not win the other four.

What it charges: nothing on bank transfer, cash on delivery, or orders handed off to WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, email or phone, because Sailo never touches that money. On card payments it takes 1–3% of the goods, after discounts, excluding delivery and tax, charged as a Stripe application fee. The card charge itself lands in your own Stripe account, not in Sailo's.

What it costs: $0 for the free plan, capped at 10 products and 7 days of analytics. $19/mo or $180/yr for Pro, which lifts you to 100 products, a year of analytics, CSV export and no Sailo badge. $49/mo or $468/yr for Business, which drops the card fee to 1%. Card works on every plan, and needs a Stripe account that Stripe has cleared for charges.

Now the parts that should put you off.

Card is Stripe only. There's no Paystack integration, whatever you may read elsewhere, and there's no mobile money rail. If you get paid by M-Pesa or GCash or UPI, Sailo will run your catalogue and take the order, and the money is still a thing that happens between you and your buyer on your own rails. You can put a till number or a UPI ID in the bank transfer instructions field, which works, but it's a workaround and I'm not going to call it a feature.

Sailo also cannot tell you a bank transfer arrived. Only your bank can. Manual rails mean you confirm every payment yourself, and if you take 60 orders a month by transfer, that's a real job that lands on you.

And it will never send you a customer. No marketplace, no search, no directory. Every visitor got there because you sent them.

If a comparison article never tells you which buyer should walk away, it isn't a comparison. It's an advert with a table in it.

What to do this week

Don't pick a tool yet. Do this instead, in this order.

Count your orders from last month. Write down the average order value. Multiply by the percentage each candidate charges, then add the monthly fee, and put the two totals next to each other. If the difference is under about $10 a month, the fee isn't your deciding factor and you should choose on payment rails and speed instead.

Then check the exit before the entrance. Ask, for every candidate, whether you can export your customer list, whether your product URLs survive if you leave, and what happens to your files if you stop paying. Owning your customer list explains why that answer matters more than any feature, and moving off a platform without losing customers is the runbook for when you eventually do leave.

If you're on a free plan now and wondering whether paying would earn its money back, work through free versus paid selling tools with your own order count rather than a hypothetical one.