What to put in your bio link

Someone watched your reel, liked it, tapped your profile, and tapped the link. They're now looking at your page with about eight seconds of patience and one thumb.

What they see in those eight seconds decides everything else.

The page needs to answer three things without a scroll and without a second tap: what you sell, what it costs, and how to get it. Everything else on that page is either helping with those three or getting in the way. Most bio links fail on the second one, because the seller is nervous about putting ₹1,299 where everyone can see it, and that single omission is what turns a buyer into a "DM for price" enquiry that you'll answer in four hours and lose.

The three questions, in the order they're asked

They aren't asked equally, and they aren't asked in the order you'd guess.

What is this? Answered by the top image and about four words. If your top image is a logo, this question is unanswered and you've spent the buyer's first two seconds on branding.

What does it cost? Asked immediately, before any detail about materials or shipping or your story. A price is not a closing detail. It's the filter that decides whether the person keeps reading, and a buyer who can't find one assumes it's expensive.

How do I get it? Meaning: is this a real shop or a display? A button that says "Order" is a shop. A line that says "DM to order" is a display, and it costs the buyer a tap plus a wait plus the awkwardness of talking to a stranger.

If your page answers all three above the fold, the rest of it is a bonus. If it answers one, the rest of it is decoration.

What earns a place above the fold

Above the fold means before any scrolling, on a phone, which is less space than you think. Roughly: one image, a name, and two or three items.

What belongs there:

• Your shop name, in text. Not only in a logo. People read it and search it later.
• One line saying what you sell and where you deliver. "Handmade silver jewellery, ships across India, 2 to 4 days." Fourteen words that answer four questions.
• The first two or three products, with prices and photos. The actual products, not categories.

What does not belong there: a hero banner with your slogan on it, an "About us" block, a newsletter signup, and a carousel of five lifestyle photos before the first price. Each of those is a thing you have to scroll past.

The most common mistake is putting "About us" at the top. Nobody in the history of Instagram has tapped a bio link to learn about you. They tapped it because they wanted the green one in medium, and your founder story is between them and it.

Order the page by what you just posted

Here's the reordering that pays and almost nobody does.

Your page probably lists products in the order you added them, or by what sells best. Neither is right. It should lead with whatever you posted in the last week, because that's what the person tapping the link just saw.

Someone watches a reel about the new block-printed cushion covers, taps through, and lands on a page that opens with the tote bags you've been selling since March. They now have to hunt. Most won't. They'll assume the cushion covers aren't available yet and leave, and you'll conclude the reel didn't convert.

So: post something, move it to the top of the page the same day. It takes thirty seconds and it's the highest-return thirty seconds in this whole article.

Prices go on the page, including the ones you're nervous about

Sellers hide prices for three reasons and none of them survive contact with the arithmetic.

"I want to have the conversation." You want the sale. The conversation is a cost you pay to get it, and most people won't start one.

"My prices vary." Then show a from-price. "From ₹1,299" is an answer. Silence is not.

"I don't want competitors seeing them." Your competitors already know your prices. They've seen your posts. The only person your secrecy is working on is your customer.

A price on the page is the difference between browsing and buying. Hiding it doesn't protect your margin, it just moves the decision into your inbox where it takes four hours and often dies.

If your price genuinely can't be fixed, because it's custom work or bulk, put the range and the basis. "Custom orders from ₹4,000, priced per piece after a quick chat" is honest, it filters, and it keeps you from spending an hour quoting someone with a ₹500 budget.

What to cut

Go through your page and remove these. All of them, today.

What to cut	Why it's costing you
A link tree above your products	It's a menu of ways to leave. See why your link in bio is costing you sales
"About us" above the products	Nobody tapped for this
A newsletter signup at the top	You're asking for something before you've given anything
Every social icon you have	They're already on your profile. This is a loop back to where they came from
Products you can't currently make	An out-of-stock item is a page that says "maybe not"
Categories with one item in them	A category is a tap. One item behind a tap is a hidden item
A cover video that autoplays	On a train, with two bars, it's a blank rectangle

The general rule: if something on the page isn't a product, a price, or the answer to a question a buyer asks before paying, it's competing with the things that are.

The 150 characters above the link

The bio itself is doing work too, and it's the one part most sellers rewrite five times and still get wrong.

It needs three things. What you sell, in plain words a stranger would use. Where you deliver, because it's the second question and it's free to answer. And one line telling them what the link is, because "link below" is weaker than "prices and order here".

Skip the inspirational quote. Skip the list of emoji-separated adjectives. And put your city or country in it, because a buyer in Pune deciding between two accounts will pick the one that clearly ships to Pune.

If you offer more than one thing that people search for by name, name them. "Cold-pressed oils and ghee" is findable. "Wellness, curated" is not.

Ananya in Bengaluru: 42 products, then 12

Ananya sells hand-block-printed home textiles from Bengaluru. Cushion covers at ₹899, table runners at ₹1,299, a quilt at ₹4,500. She posts three or four times a week, and most of her orders arrive over UPI, which needs no gateway and no setup and works from a plain UPI ID.

Her first page had 42 products on it, arranged in six categories, with an about section and a photo of her studio at the top.

Her conversion problem was not obvious from her side. People were tapping the link. They just weren't ordering, and she assumed it was price.

She cut the page to 12 products. Removed the categories entirely. Put the studio photo at the bottom, where it now does its actual job of reassuring someone who's already interested. Moved prices onto every item. And made a habit of dragging whatever she posted that week to the top.

What she noticed first wasn't the sales, it was the DMs. "How much is the blue one" basically stopped, because the blue one now has ₹899 under it. She got fewer messages and more orders, which felt wrong for about a fortnight and then felt obviously correct.

The 30 products she cut weren't wasted work. They were the reason nobody could find the six things she actually wanted to sell.

The link itself is part of the offer

The URL is not just plumbing. It gets read out loud, typed from memory, and printed on things, so it should be short and it should be your shop name.

sailo.store/anjali-textiles works because a customer can hear it in a voice note and type it correctly. A string of random characters from a link shortener works only as long as someone can tap it, which rules out every offline situation you'll ever be in.

That matters more than it sounds, because your bio is not the only place the link belongs. Put it in all of these:

• Your Instagram bio, obviously, and your story highlight cover.
• Your WhatsApp Business profile, which a lot of sellers never fill in.
• Your TikTok and Facebook profiles, even the ones you barely use.
• The bottom of your product photos, if you sell at markets.
• A slip of paper in every parcel you send, because a happy customer with your link reorders without asking you anything.

One page, linked from everywhere, is also what makes it worth spending time on. If you have four different pages for four platforms, you'll maintain none of them properly and the prices will drift apart, which is a specific kind of embarrassing when a buyer notices.

The thing to be clear-eyed about: none of this brings you traffic. A link is a destination, not a source. Every visitor arrives because you posted something, and no amount of tidying the page changes that. Tidying the page changes how many of those visitors buy, which is the only lever you actually own.

The eight-second test

Do this now, properly, because reading your own page doesn't work. You know where everything is.

Hand your phone to someone who has never seen your shop. Open the page, let them look for eight seconds, then take it away and ask three questions.

1. What does this shop sell?
2. What does one cost, roughly?
3. How would you buy something?

Three right answers, you're done. Two, fix the missing one. Fewer than two and the problem is almost certainly at the top of the page, not further down, because they never got further down.

Run it again after any change. Five people over a month will teach you more than any analytics dashboard, because a dashboard tells you they left and a person tells you why.

The limit you'll hit, and it's a real one

Sailo's free plan holds 10 products. That is a genuine cap and it will annoy you eventually, especially if you sell one-of-one items like vintage clothing where every piece is its own listing.

The awkward part is that for most sellers reading this, 20 is already more than they should have on the page. Twelve well-photographed products with prices will out-earn 60 half-finished ones, and the cap is only a problem once you've genuinely outgrown it. When you do, Pro is $19 a month for 100 products, and unlimited comes with Business at $49.

The other thing worth knowing before you plan around it: card payments need a Stripe account cleared for charges, and Sailo takes 1–3% of the goods on card orders. On bank transfer, UPI written into your transfer instructions, cash on delivery, or an order handed to WhatsApp, Sailo takes nothing and never touches the money. There's no UPI rail as such. You put your UPI ID in the payment instructions and the buyer pays you directly, which is how most Indian sellers already work, and it means matching a UTR to an order is a job you do yourself. Whether that's a problem worth $49 a month to solve is covered in do you need card payments to sell online.

Cut three things before you add one

Open your page right now and delete the three least useful things on it. Probably the about section, probably a category, probably the two products you haven't sold since April.

Then put a price on anything that doesn't have one, and drag this week's post to the top.

That's the whole job, and it's twenty minutes. If you're wiring this into the rest of what you're doing on Instagram and WhatsApp, the full picture is in selling on social media without a website, and the flow from a message to a finished order is in turning Instagram DMs into orders.