Real 2026 build prices, the Shopify vs WooCommerce running-cost maths at four revenue levels, the extra transaction fee only Indian merchants pay — and the cases where you should not build a store at all.
An e-commerce website costs ₹40,000 to ₹2,50,000 to build in India in 2026 and ₹31,000 to ₹1,36,000 a year to run. A Shopify or WooCommerce store with payments, shipping and a real product catalogue configured properly is ₹40,000–₹90,000 and three to five weeks; a custom-coded store with advanced features or an ERP integration is ₹1,50,000–₹5,00,000 and eight weeks or more. But the build price is the smaller decision. Shopify charges you a subscription plus a percentage of every order; WooCommerce charges nothing for the software and everything in maintenance labour. That difference — not the theme, not the features — is what actually decides which one is cheaper for you, and the two lines cross at around ₹13 lakh a year in sales.
These are the bands ZoopCoder works from and publishes. The middle column is what we actually charge; the market band on either side is what you should expect to see quoted elsewhere in India for the same scope.
| Type of store | ZoopCoder price | Build time | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter store | ₹40,000+ | 2–3 weeks | Configured theme, up to ~50 products, one payment gateway, basic shipping rules |
| Standard Shopify / WooCommerce store | ₹40,000 – ₹90,000 | 3–5 weeks | Custom design pass, variants, discount rules, GST-compliant invoicing, courier integration |
| Larger catalogue store | ₹40,000 – ₹1,50,000 | 4–7 weeks | Hundreds to thousands of SKUs, faceted search, bulk import, multi-warehouse stock |
| Custom-coded store | ₹1,50,000 – ₹5,00,000 | 8–16 weeks | Custom checkout or pricing logic, ERP / Tally / accounting integration, B2B roles, subscriptions |
| Marketplace (multi-vendor) | ₹2,50,000+ | 12 weeks+ | Seller onboarding, commission and settlement logic, seller dashboards, dispute handling |
Below about ₹40,000 in India you are generally buying a theme installation rather than a store — which can be the right purchase, but you should know that is what it is. Above ₹5,00,000 you are usually paying for integration work with systems you already run, not for the storefront.
This is the single most expensive thing on this page and it is almost never mentioned in Indian e-commerce cost guides, so read it before you choose a platform.
Shopify Payments — Shopify’s own in-house card processor — does not operate in India. Indian merchants therefore have to use a third-party gateway such as Razorpay, PayU or Cashfree, and Shopify charges an additional transaction fee on every order that goes through one: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced. That is charged on top of what your gateway already takes, which for a standard Razorpay account is about 2% on domestic cards. So an Indian store on Shopify Basic can pay roughly 4% on a card order where a merchant in a country with Shopify Payments pays about 2%. On ₹50 lakh of annual sales, that extra 2% is ₹1,00,000 a year — more than the entire cost of building the store.
There is nothing improper about it; it is Shopify recovering the processing margin it cannot earn here. But it changes the arithmetic completely, and it is why the honest answer to “is Shopify cheaper?” in India is different from the answer everywhere else. Rates change — check Shopify’s current India pricing page before you commit to a plan.
Both platforms are compared here excluding the payment gateway’s own percentage, because you pay that either way and it cancels out. Shopify figures use annual billing plus 18% GST on the subscription, plus Shopify’s third-party transaction fee. WooCommerce figures use realistic Indian hosting plus a real maintenance plan, because WordPress left unpatched is the most common way Indian small-business sites get defaced — “free software” is only free if nobody is paid to look after it.
| Annual online sales | Shopify (best plan for that volume) | WooCommerce (hosting + maintenance) | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|
| ₹5,00,000 | ~₹31,200 Basic ₹21,200 + 2% fee ₹10,000 | ~₹42,000 hosting ₹6,000 + ₹3,000/mo plan | Shopify |
| ₹15,00,000 | ~₹51,200 Basic ₹21,200 + 2% fee ₹30,000 | ~₹48,000 hosting ₹12,000 + ₹3,000/mo plan | WooCommerce, just |
| ₹50,00,000 | ~₹1,21,200 Basic ₹21,200 + 2% fee ₹1,00,000 | ~₹1,21,000 hosting ₹25,000 + ₹8,000/mo plan | A dead heat |
| ₹1,00,00,000 | ~₹1,79,300 Grow ₹79,300 + 1% fee ₹1,00,000 | ~₹1,36,000 hosting ₹40,000 + ₹8,000/mo plan | WooCommerce |
Shopify India list prices on annual billing, 2026: Starter ₹399/mo, Basic ₹1,499/mo, Grow ₹5,599/mo, Advanced ₹22,680/mo, Plus from ₹1,75,000/mo — all before 18% GST. Maintenance plan figures are ZoopCoder’s published rates (₹3,000 / ₹8,000 / ₹15,000+ per month). Paid Shopify apps are excluded from both columns and can add ₹1,000–₹10,000 a month if you install them.
Shopify is cheaper to run below roughly ₹13 lakh a year in sales. WooCommerce is cheaper above it. The arithmetic is simple enough to check: Shopify Basic costs ₹21,200 a year in subscription plus 2% of sales, while a maintained WooCommerce store costs roughly ₹48,000 a year flat. Set those equal — ₹21,200 + 2% of sales = ₹48,000 — and you get ₹13.4 lakh. Below that, the percentage is small and you are paying for maintenance you barely need. Above it, the percentage keeps growing and the maintenance bill does not.
One more crossover worth knowing, because Shopify will suggest the upgrade long before it saves you anything: staying on Basic beats moving to Grow until about ₹58 lakh a year in sales. Grow costs roughly ₹58,000 more per year in subscription and saves you 1% in transaction fees, so it only pays for itself once 1% of your sales exceeds ₹58,000. Below that, upgrading costs you money.
Almost every Indian store owner budgets a flat 2% and is wrong in both directions. The rate depends on the method, and your payment mix is not something you can guess.
| Payment method | What it typically costs a merchant | The thing people get wrong |
|---|---|---|
| UPI | MDR is zero by regulation, but gateways charge a platform fee, commonly ~2% + 18% GST on the fee | “Zero MDR” means the bank takes nothing. Your gateway still can, and usually does. |
| Domestic debit / credit cards | ~2% on a standard Razorpay-type account | Rates are negotiable at volume. Nobody tells you this; ask once you are past a few lakh a month. |
| Netbanking | Typically similar to cards, bank-dependent | Success rates vary by bank far more than the fee does — a failed payment costs you the whole order. |
| International cards | Roughly double the domestic rate | If you sell abroad, do not model it at the domestic rate. |
| Cash on delivery | No gateway fee, but a courier COD handling charge — and full two-way shipping on every refusal | This is the most expensive method in the table and it looks like the cheapest. |
Gateway fees change and are account-specific. Treat these as the shape of the problem and read your own gateway’s current pricing page for the numbers.
A store quote covers building the store. These are the costs that arrive anyway, and they are the reason a ₹60,000 store has a first year closer to ₹1,20,000.
| Cost | Typical India figure | Avoidable? |
|---|---|---|
| Product photography | ₹150 – ₹800 per product | Only if you shoot it yourself — and it will look like it |
| Catalogue data entry (descriptions, variants, weights, HSN codes) | Several days of work per few hundred SKUs | No. Someone does it — you, or someone you pay |
| Domain + SSL | ₹800 – ₹1,500/year; SSL free via Let’s Encrypt | Never pay for a basic SSL certificate |
| Transactional email / SMS / WhatsApp order updates | ₹500 – ₹3,000/month at small volume | Partly — email is cheap, SMS and WhatsApp are not |
| Paid apps / plugins (reviews, subscriptions, page builders) | ₹1,000 – ₹10,000/month if you install them | Yes. Install nothing until a real problem demands it |
| Returns and RTO on cash-on-delivery orders | Two-way shipping + packaging, per refused order | Reducible with partial prepaid, not avoidable |
ZoopCoder builds e-commerce stores, so read this section knowing exactly what we sell. We are including it because a store built at the wrong moment does not fail loudly — it just sits there costing ₹40,000 a year while you keep taking the orders the way you always did.
If two or more of those apply, we will tell you so on the call rather than after the invoice. The correct answer surprisingly often is a ₹25,000 catalogue website with a payment link, and to build the real store in six months with actual sales data behind it.
₹40,000 to ₹2,50,000 to build for the great majority of businesses. A Shopify or WooCommerce store with payments, shipping and a product catalogue configured properly is ₹40,000–₹90,000 in three to five weeks. A custom-coded store with custom checkout logic or an ERP integration is ₹1,50,000–₹5,00,000 in eight weeks or more. Below about ₹40,000 you are buying a theme installation rather than a store; above ₹5,00,000 you are usually paying for integration with systems you already run, not for the storefront.
Shopify below roughly ₹13 lakh a year in sales, WooCommerce above it — assuming you pay someone to maintain the WooCommerce store rather than doing it yourself. The two platforms charge in different currencies: Shopify takes a subscription plus a percentage of every order, WooCommerce takes nothing for the software but requires hosting and continuous security maintenance priced in labour. Sales growth inflates Shopify’s percentage while WooCommerce’s maintenance stays roughly flat, so the lines cross. At about ₹50 lakh a year the two are a dead heat and you should decide on control and staffing, not price.
Yes. Shopify Payments is not available in India, so Indian merchants use a third-party gateway — and Shopify charges an additional fee on every order that goes through one: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, on top of the ~2% your gateway already takes. An Indian store on Shopify Basic can therefore pay roughly 4% on a card order where a merchant in a Shopify Payments country pays about 2%. On ₹50 lakh of annual sales that extra 2% is ₹1,00,000 a year, which is more than the cost of building the store. Check Shopify’s current India rates before planning around this.
Roughly ₹31,000 to ₹1,36,000 a year, excluding the gateway percentage you pay either way. A Shopify Basic store doing ₹5 lakh a year costs about ₹31,200: ₹21,200 subscription including 18% GST plus ~₹10,000 in Shopify third-party fees. The same volume on WooCommerce is about ₹42,000: ~₹6,000 hosting plus a ₹3,000/month maintenance plan. At ₹1 crore in annual sales it reverses — Shopify ~₹1,79,000 on Grow against WooCommerce ~₹1,36,000.
UPI has zero MDR by regulation, but it is not free to accept. The bank interchange genuinely is nil. Payment gateways, however, charge a separate platform or technology fee for the dashboard, reconciliation, refunds and settlement — commonly around 2% plus 18% GST on that fee. Zero MDR means the bank takes nothing, not that your gateway takes nothing. Read your gateway’s pricing page for the specific line item; assuming UPI orders are free is a quiet way to misprice a low-margin catalogue.
Three to eight weeks for most stores — three to five for a configured Shopify or WooCommerce build, eight or more for a custom or ERP-integrated store. The biggest cause of delay is not development but product data: photographs, descriptions, variants, weights and HSN codes are almost always the client’s responsibility and almost always late. A store with 500 products and no photography ready will not launch in five weeks no matter who builds it.
Yes, and it is a normal thing to do once the percentage fees start to hurt — products, customers and orders all export. What does not move is your theme, your app configurations and any custom Shopify code, so budget a rebuild of the storefront rather than a migration of it. The practical implication is worth planning for from day one: choosing Shopify to start is a reversible decision, and it is usually the right one when you cannot yet predict your revenue. Just do the crossover arithmetic once a year instead of never.
Tell us your expected monthly orders, your average order value and your payment mix. We will work out which platform is cheaper for you — and if the honest answer is that you should not build a store yet, we will say that instead.