Writing a bio that sells

"Every version of my bio either sounds like a brochure or says nothing at all."

You've got about 150 characters and they have to do three jobs: say what you sell in words a stranger would use, say where you deliver, and say what the link is for. In that order. There's also a name field sitting above the bio that most sellers waste on their own name, and it's the only part of your profile that search actually reads, which makes it the single most valuable line on the page.

This article is about those 150 characters and the name field. What the link points at is a separate job with separate rules, and it's covered in what to put in your bio link.

The field above the bio is the one that gets found

Your profile has three text fields and they behave differently.

Username. The handle. Short, hard to change without losing people, and it should be your shop name if you can get it.

Name. The bold line under the profile picture. You can put anything in it, up to about 30 characters, and you can change it whenever you like. Search matches this field and the username far more reliably than it matches anything in your bio.

Bio. The 150 characters below. This is read by humans who already found you. It doesn't get you found.

Which means putting "Chidinma O." in the name field is throwing away your only searchable line. Put what you sell and where in it instead:

• Ankara bags | Lagos rather than Chidinma O.
• Cold-process soap Leeds rather than Aisha
• Woven bags Davao rather than Marilou Handmade

Someone typing "ankara bags Lagos" into search is a buyer with intent, and that field is how they find you. Your own name goes in the bio if you want it there, or nowhere at all.

The three lines, in order

Line one is what you sell. Not your values, not your process, not your founding year. The noun a stranger would use.

Line two is where you deliver, and roughly how fast. It's the second question every buyer has and it's free to answer. A buyer in Pune choosing between two accounts will pick the one that clearly ships to Pune.

Line three is what the link is. Not "link below". Something that says what happens when they tap: "Prices and order below" tells them there's a shop on the other side. "Link in bio" tells them nothing and reads as decoration.

That's the structure. Everything else you were going to write goes in a post, a highlight, or nowhere.

Line one, written properly

The test for line one is whether a stranger could repeat it to a friend after reading it once.

Use the word your buyer uses, not the word your industry uses. "Cold-pressed oils" beats "wellness essentials". "Sourdough" beats "artisan bakes". "Ukay-ukay" beats "curated pre-loved fashion" if you're selling in Cebu, because that's what people call it.

Be specific enough to be findable and general enough to cover your range. "Ankara laptop sleeves and totes" is right. "Bags" is too broad, "Ankara 13-inch laptop sleeves in six prints" is too narrow, and both fail for the same reason: they don't match how anyone searches.

If your product name is unusual or invented, put the generic word next to it. Nobody searches for a brand they've never heard of.

Say where you're based here if the place is part of the appeal. "Handmade in Lagos" does two things in three words, and one of them is trust.

Line two, and the thing sellers forget

Delivery is the second question, and answering it in the bio filters out the people you'd have wasted forty minutes on.

Good versions:

• "Nationwide delivery 2-4 days, same day on the Island."
• "Ships across India in 3-5 days."
• "UK delivery 2-3 days, local pickup LS6."
• "Ships nationwide, COD available."

That last one matters in markets where cash on delivery is the default expectation rather than a fallback. If you offer it and your competitor doesn't say whether they do, you've won the comparison before anyone has messaged you.

The version that costs you money is silence. A buyer who can't tell whether you deliver to them assumes you don't, and they don't ask.

The character budget

Here's the arithmetic on a real rewrite. This is a Lagos seller of Ankara laptop sleeves and totes at ₦12,000, and the before version is what was actually in her bio.

Version	Characters	What it answers
Before	75 (emoji stripped)	Nothing a buyer asked
After	129	What, where, how fast, what the link does

The before, with the emoji taken out so you can read it: Living my dream | Est. 2021 | Handmade with love | DM to order | Link below

The after: Ankara laptop sleeves and totes, handmade in Lagos. Nationwide delivery 2-4 days, same day on the Island. Prices and order below.

Same profile, same products, same photos. One of those two versions tells a stranger whether to bother.

A few more, all inside the budget:

• 88 characters: Hand-woven bags and baskets from Davao. Ships nationwide, COD available. Tap for prices.
• 98 characters: Cold-pressed oils and ghee, made in Pune. Ships across India in 3-5 days. Prices and orders below.
• 92 characters: Leather sandals, handmade in Mombasa. Countrywide delivery 1-3 days. Sizes and prices below.

Notice how much room is left. You don't have to fill 150 characters. A bio that stops at 90 gets read; a bio that runs to 150 gets skimmed and, on smaller screens, folded behind a "more" link that most people never tap. Whatever is in your last 40 characters is effectively invisible, so never put anything load-bearing there.

What to delete

Go and open your bio. Remove all of these.

What to cut	Why
An inspirational quote	It's the same one on four thousand other profiles
"Est. 2021"	Nobody has ever bought something because of a founding year
A chain of emoji as separators	They break screen readers and eat your character budget
Adjectives with no noun attached	"Curated", "elevated", "premium", "authentic". All of them say nothing
Hashtags	Nobody taps a hashtag in a bio, and they use characters you need
"DM to order" if you have a link	See below. This one has a price attached
Your full range, listed	Two nouns maximum. The rest is what the shop page is for
Any mention of your other social accounts	They're already linked from your profile

The one people argue about is emoji. A single one, used as a bullet, is fine. Six of them arranged as punctuation is not, because they push your actual words past the fold and they make the whole thing read as decoration rather than information.

Wellness. Curated. Slow living. Est. 2021. is 42 characters that tell a buyer nothing about what's for sale. If you can't work out what a profile sells from the bio in three seconds, neither can anybody else.

"DM to order" is a sentence with a cost

If you have a working shop link, delete those four words.

"DM to order" asks the buyer to start a conversation with a stranger, wait an unknown amount of time, and negotiate. Some people are happy to do that. Most, at eleven at night, are not, and they close the app.

It also creates work for you that you don't get paid for. Every DM order means typing the price, typing the delivery cost, typing your bank details, chasing the address, then chasing the payment. A shop link with prices on it does all of that once instead of forty times.

The exception is genuine. If everything you sell is custom, or priced per job, or negotiated, then a conversation is the product and "message me for a quote" is honest. Say that instead, and say what a typical job costs, so people can self-select: "Custom orders from ₦25,000, message for a quote" is worth more than either version alone.

The bio and the link do different jobs

Worth being clear about the division, because most advice mashes them together.

The bio's job is to make someone decide you're worth a tap. It's read on a profile, in about three seconds, usually right after someone watched one of your videos. It answers what, where and why bother.

The link's job starts after the tap, and it's a different set of decisions entirely: what goes above the fold, how many products, where the prices sit, what to cut. If your bio is doing its job and people still aren't ordering, the problem has moved downstream and what to put in your bio link is where to look next.

One thing that belongs in both places: your shop URL should be readable. sailo.store/adaora-bags gets typed correctly from a voice note or a printed flyer. A string of random characters only works while someone can tap it, which rules out every offline situation you'll ever be in.

Worked example: Ankara bags in Lagos

Adaora sells Ankara-print laptop sleeves and totes in Lagos. Sleeves at ₦12,000, totes at ₦18,000, about 30 orders a month. Most buyers pay by bank transfer, some by card, and a handful want cash on delivery within Lagos.

Her profile before:

• Name field: Adaora
• Bio: the 75-character version above, with five emoji in it
• Link: her shop

She changed three things in about ten minutes.

The name field became Ankara bags | Lagos. This is the change that produced something she could actually see, because she started getting profile visits from search rather than only from her own posts and other people's tags.

The bio became the 129-character version. She kept "handmade in Lagos" because it's the reason people choose her over an importer, and she added "same day on the Island" because that's a genuine advantage she'd never mentioned anywhere.

And she deleted "DM to order". This was the change she was most nervous about and the one with the clearest effect: her messages dropped noticeably and her orders didn't. What she'd been treating as demand was mostly people asking a question the bio can now answer for free.

The thing she hadn't expected: people started saying "the same-day one" when they messaged her. A single phrase in a bio became how her customers described her business, which is worth more than the characters it cost.

Test it on a stranger, not on yourself

Reading your own bio doesn't work. You know what you sell.

Send your profile link to two people who've never seen it, give them five seconds, then ask three questions:

1. What does this shop sell?
2. Where does it deliver?
3. What happens if you tap the link?

Three right answers and you're done. Two, fix the missing one. If they can't answer the first, the problem is line one and nothing further down will save it.

Do this again in six months, because bios drift. You'll add something at Christmas and never take it out.

When you sell more than one thing

Two nouns. That's the limit, and it's a real limit.

"Cold-pressed oils and ghee" works. "Oils, ghee, pickles, spice blends, gift boxes and hampers" does not, because a list of six things reads as a shop with no centre and a buyer can't hold it in their head.

Pick the two that most people arrive for and let the shop page carry the rest. If your range genuinely has two unrelated halves, say the category rather than the items: "home textiles" covers cushion covers, runners and quilts in two words.

Then keep the bio still and change your posts instead. Rewriting your bio every month is a way of feeling productive without changing anything, and the seller who settles on a clear line and leaves it alone for a year beats the seller who rewrites it eleven times.

The honest limitation

None of this brings you traffic. A bio converts attention you already earned; it doesn't create any. If nobody's looking at your profile, the bio is not the problem and rewriting it is a way of avoiding the problem.

On the Sailo side, one thing worth knowing before a Nigerian or Kenyan seller builds a plan around it: there's no mobile money rail and no Paystack integration. Card payments go through Stripe, and they need a Stripe account cleared for charges, with Sailo taking 1–3% of the goods on card orders. Everything else, bank transfer, cash on delivery, an order handed to WhatsApp, costs nothing and Sailo never touches the money. Plenty of sellers put their account details or a till number into the bank transfer instructions and run the money themselves. That works, and it's honest to describe it that way, but you should know it's a workaround and not a button.

What to do next

Open your profile and change the name field first. Right now, before the bio. Replace your own name with what you sell and where, in under 30 characters, and see what happens to your profile visits over the next fortnight.

Then rewrite the bio to the three lines: product, delivery, what the link does. Count the characters, aim for under 120, and delete "DM to order" if you have a link that works.

Then leave it alone for six months and go and take better photographs, because the grid underneath the bio is doing at least half of the persuading and it's the half most sellers never touch. How to photograph what you sell is the afternoon that fixes it. And if you want the messages that do arrive to turn into orders instead of conversations, turning Instagram DMs into orders has the replies worth saving.