How to choose a link in bio tool without reading a feature list

You've got six tabs open, every one of them says it's the best, and all six feature lists look identical. Somewhere in there is a decision you have to make tonight, and none of the marketing pages is helping.

So ignore the feature lists. There are nine questions that decide whether a link makes you money, and roughly four popular features that never do. You can test any candidate against all nine in about twenty minutes, using a free account and your own phone.

The range you're choosing inside is wider than it looks. On 6 August 2026, Payhip's free plan charged 5% of each sale and Gumroad charged 10% plus $0.50 on sales through your own link, while subscription products charge a flat monthly fee and nothing per order. On 12 orders a month those two shapes are close. On 200 they're hundreds of dollars apart, in whichever direction your order value points.

The nine questions, in the order they matter

1. Can a buyer see a price without tapping anything

Open the demo page on your phone, on mobile data, and count how far you scroll before you can read a number.

If a price needs a tap, you've built a catalogue rather than a shop. Every tap between wanting and paying loses people, and the tap that costs most is the one that opens a second app or a second website. That's the moment someone remembers they were doing something else.

This one test throws out more candidates than the other eight combined.

2. Does the tool hold your money, and for how long

Two shapes exist. The tool collects the payment and pays you out on a schedule, or the money goes straight into your own account and the tool never touches it.

If it holds the money, find out: the payout schedule, the minimum balance before it pays out, the hold period on a new account, and the conditions under which a balance gets frozen. That last one is buried in the terms and it usually triggers on unusual volume. Which is to say, on your best week.

If it doesn't hold the money, you get paid instantly and there's no payout to wait for. You also become the person who checks whether payment arrived, and there's no dispute process sitting between you and an unhappy buyer.

Neither is safer in the abstract. Ask which failure you'd rather have, then choose.

3. Can you offer the payment method your buyers actually use

Not the ones you'd like them to use. The ones they use.

If you sell in Lagos and your buyers pay by bank transfer, a product that only does card is a product that can't take your orders. If you sell in Manila and half your orders are cash on delivery, you need somewhere to write delivery notes and a way to mark an order paid after the courier hands over the cash. If you sell in Pune and everyone pays by UPI, you need a field where a UPI ID and a QR code can live, and an order flow that doesn't assume a gateway.

Most link-in-bio products are built card-first because they're built for the US. That assumption is invisible on the pricing page and fatal at checkout.

Check the actual list of payment options before anything else on this list. Then check whether you can write your own instructions next to them, because half of taking a bank transfer is telling the buyer exactly what reference to put on it. There's more on choosing rails in how to take payment as a small seller.

4. How many days until you could take a real order

Sign up and try to get to a live page with one product, one price and one payment method. Time it.

Under an hour is a product built for you. Half a day is fine. If it wants a domain, a theme decision, a shipping matrix and a tax setting before it'll show anyone a price, it's built for a business two sizes larger than yours, and you'll spend a fortnight setting up a shop for a product that might not sell.

Speed to a first order isn't laziness. It's how you find out whether anyone wants the thing, before you've spent a month on the shop.

5. Can you get your customer list out, and in what format

Ask this on day one, not on the day you leave.

You want a CSV with names, contact details, what each person bought and when. If the answer is "you can see your orders in the dashboard", that's not an export, that's a window. If the export is behind a paid tier, that's a real cost you should count now rather than discover later.

The customer list is the only asset you build that doesn't belong to the tool. Owning your customer list makes the full argument. For the purposes of choosing, the rule is simple: if you can't get the list out, you're renting your customers.

6. What does the page weigh on a bad connection

Load the demo page with your phone on 4G in a lift, on a train, or anywhere with two bars.

A shop page that takes eight seconds on a slow connection loses most of the people who tapped it. If a meaningful share of your buyers are in India, Nigeria, Kenya, Indonesia or the Philippines, this isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between the link working and the link being decorative.

Watch specifically for: a video header, a custom font that blocks the text from rendering, and product images served at desktop resolution. Any one of those will double your load time on a phone.

7. What happens when you stop paying

Every tool answers this differently and almost none of them answer it on the pricing page.

Does the page go offline, or drop to the free tier? Do products above the free limit get hidden or deleted? Do your uploaded files stay downloadable for buyers who already paid? Does the URL keep working, or does it 404 and take your search ranking with it?

You'll want to know this on the month money is tight, and that's a bad month to find out. What happens if a tool shuts down covers the more permanent version of the same question.

8. Where does an order actually land

An order is only useful if you see it in time to pack it.

Some tools email you. Some show it in a dashboard you check twice a day. Some hand the order to WhatsApp, which means it lands in the app you already have open. The last one sounds primitive and is often the best, because a message you'll definitely read beats a notification you'll definitely miss.

Check what the order contains, too. Item, options, quantity, delivery address, total. If the buyer has to type their address separately into a DM, you'll spend your evenings chasing addresses instead of packing.

9. Can it tell the truth about stock

Sold out, back in stock, only two left. These sound like minor features until you sell the same jacket twice on a Saturday morning and have to write one of those apologies.

If you sell one-of-one items, second-hand, or anything made in small batches, this question moves to number two on the list. If you sell files, it doesn't apply at all.

The four things that look important and aren't

A custom domain. Useful eventually. Irrelevant to your first hundred sales, because the link gets tapped from your bio, not typed from memory.

Theme choice and colour pickers. An hour of your life you will never see again. Buyers do not decide based on your accent colour. They decide based on the photo, the price, and whether they trust you.

Analytics depth. Under 50 orders a month, you already know where your sales come from, because you posted the reel that caused them. Deep funnel analytics on 30 orders is astrology with charts.

"Unlimited" anything. Unlimited products matters if you have 400 products. Most sellers reading this have between 6 and 40, will never have 400, and are paying a premium for a number they'll never approach.

Priya in Pune: choosing on rails, not features

Priya sells hand-block-printed cotton kurtas from Pune. ₹1,450 each, about 25 a month, plus a ₹2,600 two-piece set she makes a few of every season. Instagram is where she sells, and roughly nine in ten of her customers pay by UPI.

She spent a weekend comparing four products on features. All four looked fine. Then she ran question three and three of them died immediately, because their only checkout was card, and asking an Indian customer to enter a card number when they've been paying by UPI for years is asking them to do a harder thing for no reason.

The fourth let her put her UPI ID and a QR code in the payment instructions and hand the order off to WhatsApp. That's not sophisticated. There's no gateway, no settlement, no integration. The buyer picks the kurta and the size, taps to order, the details arrive in her WhatsApp with the total, she sends the QR, they pay, she confirms.

Her real cost is time. She checks her UPI app, matches the amount to the order, and marks it paid. Twenty-five times a month that's fine. She reckons at about 80 orders a month it stops being fine, and at that point a proper gateway starts earning its fee. She's not there yet, and she's not going to pay for it until she is.

The thing she got wrong first time round, and this is the part worth stealing: she set up all her products before she tested the checkout. Two days of photographing and writing descriptions inside a tool she then abandoned. Test the checkout with one product and ₹1 before you upload anything.

Score them, don't feel them

Take your three finalists. Give each one a yes or no on all nine questions. Don't score out of ten, don't weight anything, and don't let a nice interface buy back a no on question three.

Question	Weight
Price visible without a tap	Fail here and stop
Payment rails your buyers use	Fail here and stop
Customer list exportable	Fail here and think hard
Days to first order	Under a day, ideally
Who holds the money	Choose your failure mode
Page weight on mobile data	Under three seconds
What happens if you stop paying	Know before you start
Where orders land	Somewhere you'll see
Stock accuracy	Critical only for one-of-one items

Two hard fails and it's out, regardless of how good the rest looked.

What Sailo fails on, since you're going to check anyway

Sailo answers question three well and question two cleanly, because on bank transfer, cash on delivery and the messaging rails it never holds your money and takes nothing from it. Card is the exception: 1–3% of the goods, after discounts, excluding delivery and tax, landing in your own Stripe account.

Where it fails: card payments carry 3% on the free plan, so a seller doing eight card orders a month is paying a subscription for a rail that's barely used. The free plan stops at 10 products. CSV export starts on Pro at $19/mo, so on the free plan you can see your orders but you can't export them, which by question five's own standard is a real limitation. Card is Stripe only, no Paystack. There's no mobile money rail, and no native app.

And Sailo cannot tell you a bank transfer arrived. Only your bank can. If you're on manual rails, question two's answer is that you hold the money and you also do the reconciliation.

The tool that wins your comparison is usually the one that failed the fewest questions, not the one that won the most features.

Do the twenty-minute test tonight

Pick your three finalists. Open a free account on each. Add one product with a real price, set the payment method your buyers actually use, and open the resulting page on your own phone with wifi turned off.

Then send that link to one friend and ask them to place a real order for something cheap. Watch what they do. The place they hesitate is the place your customers have been leaving for eight months.

Once you've picked, the next question is what actually goes on the page, which is a different discipline and covered in what to put in your bio link. If you want the four categories of product laid out with dated prices rather than criteria, start from link in bio tools compared.