The problem worth solving here is not "how do I make a QR code". It is that people walk past your shop, like what they see, and have no way to keep it. Typing a handle into a phone in the street is enough friction to lose most of them.
What to point it at
Your public profile URL — instagram.com/yourhandle. Not a post, not a story, not a link-in-bio page. Someone standing outside your door wants the account, not a specific photo from last Tuesday.
Static or dynamic?
Both work. The question is whether you will ever want to change where it goes.
Static encodes the profile URL directly. It works forever, needs no account, and can never be changed.
Dynamic points at a short URL that redirects. You can change the destination later — to a campaign page during a sale, then back — and you can see how many people actually scanned it.
If the code is going on a window sticker that stays up for two years, dynamic is worth it for the one time you want to redirect it without reprinting.
Where it actually gets scanned
At eye level near the door, not at knee height on the glass
On the counter, where people wait anyway
On the receipt or the bag, which travels home with them
Not on a moving vehicle, and not on the floor
Say what it is
A bare code gets ignored. "Follow us" plus the code beats the code alone, every time. People scan when they know what they are getting.
One honest caveat
Scan counts are not follower counts. A dynamic code will tell you how many people scanned and roughly where from — it cannot tell you who followed, because that happens inside an app we have no visibility into. Compare your scan numbers against your follower growth over the same period and treat the gap as the cost of the handoff.
