The short answer is weeks. If you are working at it steadily, posting or spending a small amount most days, and selling something a person can actually want, somewhere between two and ten weeks is the ordinary range. I cannot give you your number. Nobody can. What I can do is describe what is going on inside the silence, because the silence is the part that makes people quit, and most of it is not failure. Some of it is just arithmetic that has not finished yet.
Days does happen. It happens to people who already had an audience somewhere and moved it, and to people who got one video into distribution early and got lucky. Luck is real and it is not a plan. If it arrives, take it.
What has to happen before a stranger pays you
Write out the chain once and the timeline stops feeling mysterious.
Somebody scrolling has to stop. Then they have to care enough to look at who posted it. Then they have to tap a link, which on most platforms means going to your profile first. Then they land on a page and have to find the right thing on it. Then they click through to a product. Then they read, and think about the price, and check the postage, and decide. Then they fill in a card form on a phone, one-handed, on a bus.
Seven or eight steps, and each one loses most of the people who reached it. That is not a sign of a broken business. That is what the chain looks like when it is working normally.
Now put rough numbers on it. Of a thousand video views, somewhere between five and thirty people tap through to a profile and then to your link page. Of those, maybe a third to a half click the link that leads to the shop. Of the people who arrive at a shop from social, one to two per cent buy, and for a brand nobody has heard of it can be lower. Multiply that through and a thousand views produces something like a tenth of a sale, sometimes less.
Which means the first sale often sits somewhere past five thousand views, and sometimes past twenty thousand. If you are posting three times a week and getting two hundred views a post, you can see the problem. It is not that the offer is wrong. It is that the machine has not been fed enough yet to give an opinion.
Week one: you are not testing anything yet
Week one is setup. The photos, the description, the postage settings, the account, the page, deciding what the thing is even called. It feels like work because it is work. It is not evidence.
Three posts is not a test. Six posts is not a test. I would not draw a single conclusion from anything that happened in the first seven days, good or bad, and that includes an early sale, which may have been your friend's cousin.
Weeks two to four: the quiet weeks
This is where people stop. Views are small, the shop analytics show visitors in single digits, and the honest internal monologue is that nothing is happening.
Things are happening. Four of them, roughly.
The first is repetition. Most people who buy from a small account have seen it more than once. The second and third sightings do work the first one cannot, because the first one is just noise and the third is a thing that exists. You cannot compress that. You can only keep showing up until the same person meets you again.
The second is sorting. By week three you have posted maybe fifteen times, and two of those will have done noticeably better than the rest. That is your first actual piece of information. Not the average, the outliers. Look at what the two had in common, and make more of that, rather than making fifteen more of the average.
The third is the platform working out who you are for. Distribution to a new account is cautious and gets less cautious as it collects signal. Nobody outside the companies knows the exact mechanics and anybody who tells you they do is selling a course.
The fourth is you getting faster. In week one a post takes ninety minutes. By week four it takes twenty. That change matters more than any single post, because the whole thing runs on how many attempts you can afford before you get bored.
The silence has a middle number, and you are probably missing it
During the quiet weeks most people can see exactly two numbers. Views, which are small. Sales, which are zero. Those two numbers cannot tell you where the chain is breaking, and so people guess, and the guess is almost always price. They cut the price. Nothing changes, because the problem was three steps earlier.
The number you need is in the middle. How many people actually left the platform and arrived at your link page, and which link they touched when they got there. That is the difference between nobody is interested and plenty of people are interested and then something goes wrong at the shop.
This is the part Relay is for. It is a link-in-bio page, free with no card and no time limit, unlimited links on every plan, and it counts views on the page and taps on each link. So after a fortnight of quiet you can see that four hundred people came, two hundred and ten tapped the shop, and none of them bought. That is a shop problem, and you would never have known. Or you see that eleven people came from six thousand views, which is a hook problem, and the shop is fine and untested. Same silence, two completely different weeks of work in response.
The free plan also gives you your photo and bio, social icons, five themes, headings and dividers to keep the page from turning into a pile, a QR code, and a story-sized share image. Pro is $30 a year or $4 a month plus VAT and adds all 47 themes, all 8 fonts, custom colours, a background image, per-link images, scheduled links, inline players, email capture, and removal of our badge. None of that will produce a sale on its own, and I would not upgrade until the free version is clearly the thing holding you back.
Where Relay is part of the problem
Honesty first. A link page is a corridor. It cannot sell anything. It cannot take a payment, because Relay has no payments, and it has no custom domains either, so your address is relayme.bio/yourname and not shop.yourname.com. If your product page loads slowly, or the postage cost appears as a surprise at checkout, Relay will cheerfully deliver people to that experience all week and count the taps while it does.
There is also a real cost to the corridor itself. Every extra step loses people. A link page earns its place when you have several destinations, or when you change what you sell often, or when you want the tap counts. If you sell exactly one thing and never change it, putting the product URL straight in the bio is fewer steps and you should do that. We would rather say so than pretend otherwise. If you do want the page, claiming the name takes a few minutes and there is nothing to cancel.
Data sits in the European Union, fonts are self-hosted, there is no advertising and no third-party analytics on your page. That is a reason to prefer us over something else. It is not a reason to expect sales.
Paid ads on a small budget run on a different clock
If you are spending, say, five to ten a day, the timeline stretches, and the reason is not that the ad is bad.
Ad systems want a volume of conversions before they optimise well. The commonly quoted figure for Meta is around fifty conversions per week per ad set. At five a day and a twenty-five pound product you are not going to see fifty conversions in a week, or a month. You will sit outside that threshold for a long time, which means the delivery stays rough and the cost per result bounces around.
The other thing small budgets do is make you read noise as signal. Say your realistic conversion rate is one and a half per cent. You send two hundred clicks and get nothing. The expected number was three, so zero feels damning. Run the numbers and getting zero sales from two hundred clicks at that rate happens about one time in twenty by chance alone. Uncommon, not impossible, and nowhere near enough to justify rebuilding the product page. You will need several hundred clicks before a zero means anything, and on a small budget several hundred clicks takes weeks.
So the paid route is not faster. It is more measurable, and you pay for the measurement.
What lengthens it and what shortens it
Things that lengthen it: a product nobody has a reason to want this week rather than eventually, a price that requires trust you have not built, changing five variables at once so nothing can be attributed, and rebuilding the page instead of making the next post. Also a dropshipped item with a three-week delivery estimate, which loses people at the exact moment they were about to pay.
Things that shorten it: selling to people who already know you, even a small number of them. Posting more often at lower quality rather than less often at higher quality, early on, because the sorting needs volume. Removing steps rather than adding them. Answering every comment and every message, which converts at a rate no ad matches and does not scale, which is fine, because at this stage you do not need scale, you need one.
And the boring one. Keep going in weeks three and four, when it is dullest and there is nothing to show anyone.
A reasonable way to hold it
Give it six weeks of real effort before you conclude anything about the offer. Change one thing a week, not five. Write down the number of people who reached your page each week, because that single number tells you whether the problem is upstream or downstream, and it is the one people forget to look at.
If you want a longer version of the whole sequence, there is how to make your first sale online, honestly, and if you are being offered a shortcut by someone with a rented car in the thumbnail, this one covers what is actually a scam.
The first sale is a small event. It is usually one person, often for less money than you expected, and it arrives on a Tuesday while you are doing something else. The useful part is that afterwards you know the chain works end to end, and every question changes from does this work to how much of it can I do.