The annual-sales number that picks your platform for you, 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.
Choose an Indian e-commerce platform from one number — your expected annual online sales — and not from the build price: under ₹2,00,000 a year build no store at all, between ₹2 lakh and about ₹13 lakh use Shopify, and above roughly ₹13 lakh a year in sales the two cost lines cross and WooCommerce becomes the cheaper one to own. That crossover exists because Shopify charges a subscription plus a percentage of every order, so its cost climbs with your revenue, while WooCommerce charges nothing for the software and everything in maintenance labour, which does not. The build itself costs ₹40,000 to ₹2,50,000 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.
If you expect less than about ₹2,00,000 a year in online sales, do not build a store yet: a WhatsApp Business catalogue plus a Razorpay payment link takes an afternoon and costs nothing but the transaction fee. Between ₹2 lakh and about ₹13 lakh a year, use Shopify — the subscription plus its cut is cheaper than paying somebody in India to keep WooCommerce patched. Above roughly ₹13 lakh a year in sales the two lines cross and WooCommerce becomes cheaper, because Shopify’s percentage keeps growing with your revenue while maintenance labour does not. Pick the platform from your sales number, not from the theme you liked.
ZoopCoder builds on both platforms and is paid either way, but not equally: a custom WooCommerce build is a larger project for us than a Shopify setup. That is precisely why the rule above sends most readers under ₹13 lakh in sales to Shopify, and readers under ₹2 lakh to a free WhatsApp catalogue and no agency at all.
Every international Shopify-vs-WooCommerce cost comparison you will read is written for a US merchant, and it is wrong for you in one specific way: in India the payment gateway fee itself attracts GST. Razorpay, PayU and Cashfree charge roughly 2% per transaction, and then 18% GST is levied on that fee, making the true cost about 2.36%. On ₹50,00,000 of annual sales that is ₹1,18,000, not ₹1,00,000 — an ₹18,000 a year line item that appears in no comparison table published outside India. One more India-specific catch if you plan to sell abroad from Shopify: its help centre says local-currency pricing is only supported through Shopify Payments or Adyen and that other gateways process orders in your store currency, and India is not a Shopify Payments country — so a Razorpay store can add a translated language, but not a converted-currency checkout, which is why our ₹1,299 Shopify Multilingual & Multi-Currency Setup states the currency route in writing before it starts.
If you sell through a marketplace rather than your own store, add 1% TCS under section 52 of the CGST Act, which the marketplace collects and deposits against your GSTIN. You reclaim it, but it is working capital sitting with the government until you do. Your own store has no TCS at all — a real, rarely-stated cash-flow argument for owning your storefront once volume is meaningful.
Getting onto a marketplace at all carries its own fee layer on top of that TCS. Amazon now advertises 0% referral fee on more than 12.5 crore products priced up to ₹1,000, but still charges a closing fee from ₹2 per order (revised upward again from 7 September 2026) and a weight handling fee from ₹37 per item shipped. Flipkart charges 0% commission under ₹1,000 in any category and 0% on the whole Fashion category at any price, but still applies a tier-based fixed fee to every delivered order under its Darwin seller-tier programme. Neither of those is ours to waive — if you just need the seller account itself registered and category approval filed correctly the first time, that is a fixed-price ₹5,499 Amazon Seller Account Setup or ₹5,499 Flipkart Seller Account Setup. Meesho is the third India marketplace worth knowing, and it has a real gotcha of its own: sellers can skip full GST registration using a free GST-enrolment number, but a 2023 CBIC notification restricts that route to selling within one state only, no inter-state supply at all — ₹5,499 Meesho Seller Account Setup confirms which route actually fits before filing. Etsy is a fourth option with a fully published fee stack: for an India-based seller its own help pages list a $0.20 listing fee, a 6.5% transaction fee, 5% + ₹25 payment processing and a 0.05% regulatory operating fee, which comes to about ₹140 of every ₹1,000 order before the listing fee, and the ₹2,499 Etsy Seller Account Setup covers the shop registration only, not any of those fees. Once the shop exists, Etsy's help pages cap a listing title at 140 characters and each of the 13 tags at 20 characters, which is the constraint our fixed-price ₹5,499 Etsy Listing Optimization (title, 13 tags and opening description for up to 5 listings) is written around. A marketplace account can also be suspended without warning — Amazon's own seller agreement gives it the right to suspend for any cited reason at any time, so the notice's exact wording is the only thing worth arguing against, which is what our fixed-price ₹1,499 Amazon Seller Account Suspension Appeal is built around.
One more that catches people: Shopify bills its subscription from outside India, so a GST-registered Indian merchant is liable under the reverse charge mechanism — you pay the GST to the government yourself and then claim it back. It nets to zero if you are registered and it is a genuine 18% if you are not. WooCommerce, being free software you host in India, has no equivalent. Ask your CA to confirm your position before you commit to a platform for three years.
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. If your Shopify store already exists and just needs to stop looking like the default theme, that is exactly this scope: a fixed-price ₹1,499 Shopify theme customization restyles up to 5 sections without touching your products, apps or gateway. And if the store is fine but one thing in the theme is broken, a ₹999 Shopify theme bug fix covers one reproducible fault. Above ₹5,00,000 you are usually paying for integration work with systems you already run, not for the storefront.
Not sure which of these four your store is?
Send us your product count, whether you sell B2B or direct to consumer, and what you already run for billing. We will tell you which build this needs, and if a theme install genuinely does the job, we will say so rather than quote you for custom. Reply on WhatsApp, within one working day.
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. None of that changes whether Shopify is the right platform for you under ₹13 lakh in sales; it changes the number you should be planning against. If you have decided on Shopify, a fixed-price Shopify store setup is ₹14,999 and the plan itself is ₹1,994 a month on Basic, billed to you by Shopify. On WooCommerce or a custom site the gateway is not bundled in — wiring up Razorpay, PayU or Cashfree the way the gateway actually recommends, with server-side signature verification and webhooks rather than a form that trusts the browser, is a fixed ₹3,999 payment gateway integration.
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. If WooCommerce is where you land, a fixed-price WooCommerce store with 30 products and Razorpay is ₹19,999, and the platform itself stays free — the only bills that repeat are hosting and the gateway percentage. If you sell on a recurring basis, a WooCommerce Subscriptions setup for up to five recurring products is ₹4,999; WooCommerce’s own table of 35 automatic-renewal gateways has no Indian one on it, so a Razorpay store needs Razorpay’s separate subscriptions plugin or manual renewals.
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 |
The WhatsApp row in that table is worth pricing properly, because Meta publishes the rates and almost nobody quotes them. On Meta’s India rate card effective 1 July 2026, a marketing template costs ₹0.8631 per message delivered and a utility or authentication template ₹0.1150, billed by Meta straight to your own account. Order confirmations and shipping updates are utility messages, so a store sending 2,000 of them a month is looking at roughly ₹230 — not the ₹3,000 an “integrations” line usually implies. If you also want the incoming enquiries answered automatically, a WhatsApp chatbot on the official Business Platform is a fixed ₹7,999, or if you want the same kind of assistant answering directly on your storefront rather than WhatsApp, an AI chatbot trained on your own product pages is a fixed ₹6,999. If all you need is a single sale announcement sent out to a list you already have, that is a smaller job — a one-off broadcast is a fixed ₹5,999, template designed and sent within 3-4 working days. One date has already passed: since 1 October 2026 Meta charges for the free-form replies a bot sends inside the 24-hour customer service window too, after the first 1,000 per business number each month. If a chat button is all you need, a WhatsApp click-to-chat button with per-page messages and click tracking is a fixed ₹2,499 and needs no API or per-message fees at all. And if a bot you already have has gone quiet, a WhatsApp Business API fix is ₹999 per issue. Two other lines in that table are fixed-price jobs too: if the email in that row is marketing rather than order updates, email marketing automation on Mailchimp, Klaviyo or Brevo is a fixed ₹3,999 (check the platform’s free-plan cap first — Klaviyo’s stops at 250 active profiles), and if your ad platforms are undercounting orders, server-side tracking on Stape is a fixed ₹9,999.
Orders becoming GST invoices automatically is the other sync people underestimate. If you run WooCommerce, connecting it to Zoho Books is a fixed ₹2,999 so every paid order lands as a correctly taxed invoice without re-typing it — worth knowing before you commit: Zoho’s own Free plan caps out at 1,000 invoices a year, about 83 a month, so a store past that volume needs a paid Zoho Books plan regardless of who wires up the sync. Stock counts are the third sync: Zoho Inventory set up for one warehouse and up to 150 products is a fixed ₹6,999, and the plan matters here too — Zoho’s pricing page lists its Free plan at 50 orders a month, 1 user and 1 location, with 3 users and 2 locations from Standard. If you would rather chain order alerts, sheet rows and CRM entries with a no-code tool than buy another app, a Pabbly Connect workflow built on your own account is a fixed ₹1,699; check the plan first, because Pabbly’s Free plan stops at 100 tasks a month and 2-step workflows.
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.
Pick the platform from your expected annual sales: no store under ₹2 lakh a year, Shopify from ₹2 lakh to about ₹13 lakh, WooCommerce above roughly ₹13 lakh, where the two cost lines cross. The build is ₹40,000 to ₹2,50,000 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: a fixed-price Shopify to WooCommerce migration is ₹5,499 for up to 150 products, either direction, with 301 redirects from the old URLs so the switch does not cost you search rankings. 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 what you sell and roughly how many products you will list. We send back a fixed-price quote, line by line, within 24–48 hours — payment gateway, GST-compliant invoicing and delivery integration priced separately, plus what year one costs to run.
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.