E-commerce Website Cost in India (2026): Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Custom, and What It Costs to Run

Shopify vs WooCommerce vs custom: cost at a glance

Shopify is a hosted platform: you pay a monthly subscription and Shopify handles servers, security and checkout. WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin, so you pay for hosting and maintenance instead and get more control. A custom or headless build means your own backend or a commerce engine behind a separately built storefront, giving full flexibility at a much higher price.

The build cost below covers theme setup or design, configuration, standard integrations and a modest catalogue upload. It does not include product photography or copywriting, which are discussed separately. Monthly running figures cover the platform subscription or hosting, typical apps or plugins and basic maintenance, but exclude payment gateway charges, shipping and advertising, which depend on order volume and are covered later in this guide.

When each platform makes sense

Shopify is the fastest way to a reliable store, and it removes most security and hosting worries. The trade-offs are recurring subscription and app fees, many priced in dollars, and limits on how far you can change checkout and core logic. Shopify Payments is not available in India, so stores use a third-party gateway, and some plans add a Shopify transaction fee on those orders; check the current plan terms.

WooCommerce suits businesses that already run WordPress, publish a lot of content, or need custom pricing rules without paying for a bespoke platform. You own everything, but you also own updates, backups, security and performance. Many cheap WooCommerce stores struggle not because of the platform but because of poor hosting and too many plugins.

Custom and headless builds earn their cost when your business logic does not fit a standard store: wholesale price lists per customer, garment size-and-colour matrices synced to an ERP, made-to-order products, or several brands sharing one inventory. If none of that applies, a well-built Shopify or WooCommerce store is usually the better investment.

A practical test: write down the five things your store must do that a standard storefront cannot. If you struggle to fill the list, start on a platform. If the list is long and central to how you make money, a custom build will likely cost less over time than bending a platform with dozens of apps and workarounds.

Apps and plugins: the costs that creep

Both Shopify and WooCommerce rely on add-ons for anything beyond the basics. Individually they look cheap, often $5–$50 a month or an annual licence. Collectively, a typical growing store can end up paying for ten to twenty of them, and each one adds scripts that can slow your pages. Review your app list every quarter and remove anything you are not actively using.

Before installing an app for a small feature, ask whether a few lines of theme code would do the job. For features you depend on, such as reviews or subscriptions, pick well-supported add-ons with good documentation rather than the cheapest option. On WooCommerce, prefer extensions from reputable developers with recent updates, and never install nulled copies of paid plugins, which are a common route for malware into online stores.

• Product reviews and ratings, often with photo reviews.
• Wishlists, size charts and product filters.
• Abandoned-cart recovery by email, SMS or WhatsApp.
• GST-compliant invoices and accounting sync.
• Cash-on-delivery verification and COD fees.
• Loyalty, referral and discount tools.
• SEO, image optimisation and backup plugins (WooCommerce).

Payment gateways and checkout

Indian stores typically use gateways such as Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree, CCAvenue or PhonePe to accept UPI, cards, net banking and wallets. Setup is usually free or low cost, and the gateway charges a percentage per transaction that varies by payment method and your agreement with them. Rates change, and larger merchants can negotiate, so always check the gateway's current pricing rather than relying on a figure from a blog or a sales call.

Integration cost is small on Shopify and WooCommerce, where official plugins exist, and larger on custom builds, which need webhooks, refunds and reconciliation built properly. Cash on delivery remains popular in many categories, but it brings higher return-to-origin rates, so many stores add OTP confirmation or a small COD fee to filter out unreliable orders.

• Compare pricing for UPI, domestic cards, credit cards and international cards separately.
• Ask about settlement time, since it affects your cash flow.
• Check refund handling and whether fees are returned on refunds.
• Confirm the documents needed for onboarding, such as GST and bank details.
• Test the full checkout on mobile, where most Indian shoppers buy.

Shipping and logistics integration

Most small and mid-size Indian stores ship through an aggregator such as Shiprocket, NimbusPost or ClickPost, or directly with couriers like Delhivery, Blue Dart or Xpressbees. Aggregators give you rate comparison, label printing, pickup scheduling and tracking in one dashboard, and most have ready plugins for Shopify and WooCommerce. Shipping itself is charged per shipment by weight, zone and service.

On a custom store, courier integration typically costs ₹40,000–₹2,00,000 depending on how many couriers, whether you need automatic courier selection, and how returns and RTO are handled. Pincode serviceability checks at checkout and clear delivery estimates reduce failed deliveries and support calls, and are worth including in the first version. Plan returns just as carefully as outbound shipping: a clear returns policy, reverse-pickup through your courier and a simple way to restock returned items keep costs predictable.

Product photography and content

Photos sell products online, and this is where many new stores underspend. Budget for clean white-background shots for listings and a few lifestyle or on-model images per product for the store. Rates in India vary widely by city, product type and whether models are involved; flat-lay apparel and simple products cost far less per image than jewellery or on-model fashion shoots.

Content costs are easy to forget because they sit outside the developer's quote. Someone has to write product titles and descriptions, fill attributes such as fabric, size and care instructions, set up categories and collections, and write shipping and returns policies. For a catalogue of a few hundred products, this can take longer than building the store itself.

• Product photography: plan a per-product budget and get quotes from two or three studios.
• Copywriting: descriptions, category text and policy pages.
• Catalogue upload: variants, prices, SKUs, stock and images, often charged per product.
• Size charts and care guides, especially for apparel.
• Basic brand assets: logo files, colours and banner designs.

Own store vs Amazon and Flipkart

Marketplaces give you immediate access to buyers who already trust the platform, and you do not pay to build a store. In return, you pay referral commissions, closing and fulfilment fees that vary by category and price, compete on price next to rival listings, and have limited access to customer data. Check each marketplace's current fee schedule for your category before modelling margins.

Your own store costs money to build and much more to market, because you have to bring every visitor yourself. What you get is control over pricing and branding, direct customer relationships, repeat-purchase marketing and higher margin per order once traffic arrives. Many brands run both: marketplaces for volume and discovery, their own store for loyal customers and full-price sales. If you do both, keep stock in sync across channels, either through an inventory tool or integrations, so you do not oversell.

Monthly running costs to budget

Add up the recurring costs before you launch, because they continue whether or not orders come in. A lean Shopify or WooCommerce store might spend ₹3,000–₹10,000 a month on platform or hosting and a few essential apps. A growing store with email marketing, reviews, subscriptions and a maintenance retainer commonly spends ₹15,000–₹40,000 or more, before advertising.

Transaction-linked costs, including gateway charges, shipping, packaging and returns, scale with orders and should be modelled per order rather than per month. For many new stores, marketing is the largest cost of all, often exceeding the website budget within the first few months. Build a simple spreadsheet with your average order value, product cost, gateway charge, shipping, packaging and expected return rate, and check that each order still makes money before you spend on ads.

How to build an ecommerce website: the steps in order

Whether you set the store up yourself or hire someone, the work happens in roughly this order. Most of the cost to build a website that sells sits in the middle steps: catalogue, payments and shipping, not the design.

• Decide what you sell online first: a focused range of best-sellers launches faster than the full catalogue and tells you what works.
• Choose the platform: Shopify for the least technical upkeep, WooCommerce if you already use WordPress or want to own the hosting, custom only when your rules do not fit either.
• Prepare product data: names, prices, variants, HSN codes, weights for shipping, and at least three good photos per product.
• Set up payments (a gateway with UPI and cards, plus cash on delivery if your customers expect it) and GST-correct invoices.
• Connect shipping: a courier aggregator for pin-code checks, labels and tracking, and write a clear returns policy.
• Add the legal pages (terms, privacy, refunds, shipping), then test real orders end to end, including a refund.
• Launch, then watch where visitors drop off between product page, cart and checkout before spending on ads.

How RED SAG approaches e-commerce projects

RED SAG is a small software team in Tiruppur, a city built on garments and exports, and we build Shopify, WooCommerce and custom stores, including courier, payment and ERP integrations. We will tell you plainly when a standard platform is enough and when your workflows justify a custom build, and we quote from a written scope with accounts registered in your name.

Whoever you hire, ask for a clear list of what the quote includes: design, number of products uploaded, apps or plugins purchased, courier and gateway setup, training for your staff and support after launch. Comparing quotes on that list, rather than on the final number, is the quickest way to avoid paying twice for the same store.