Disclosure: I work at ZoopCoder, an Indian development agency that builds e-commerce stores. So I sell the thing this post is about. Every number below is either our own published price or a third-party rate you can verify yourself, and I have flagged which is which. There is a section near the end on when you should not build a store at all.
If you are picking a platform for an Indian store and you have been reading cost comparisons written for a US audience, one line item is missing from all of them, and it is large enough to change the answer.
Shopify Payments does not operate in India
Shopify has its own in-house payment processor, Shopify Payments. In markets where it operates, using it means Shopify charges you no transaction fee — you pay the card rate and nothing else.
It is not available in India. So an Indian merchant has to connect a third-party gateway — Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree. And when you process through a third-party gateway, Shopify charges an additional transaction fee on every order:
| Shopify plan | Third-party gateway fee |
|---|---|
| Basic | 2% |
| Grow | 1% |
| Advanced | 0.6% |
That is on top of what your gateway already charges. 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 Shopify Payments country pays about 2%.
Scale that. On ₹50,00,000 of annual sales, the extra 2% is ₹1,00,000 a year — which is more than the cost of building the store in the first place (a standard store is ₹40,000–₹90,000; that is ZoopCoder's published price).
(Shopify's India plan prices and Razorpay's rates are third-party figures, checked July 2026. They move. Verify before you plan around them.)
The crossover, with the working shown
The usual framing is "Shopify costs money, WooCommerce is free." That is not the comparison. The platforms bill you in different currencies: Shopify takes a fixed subscription plus a percentage of sales; WooCommerce takes ₹0 for software but requires hosting and continuous security maintenance, which is priced in labour.
So Shopify's cost grows with revenue and WooCommerce's stays roughly flat. The lines cross.
| Annual online sales | Shopify | WooCommerce | 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 |
You can derive the crossover directly. Shopify Basic is ₹21,200 a year including GST, plus 2% of sales. A ₹4,000/month WooCommerce arrangement is ₹48,000 flat. Set them equal:
21,200 + 0.02S = 48,000
0.02S = 26,800
S = 13,40,000
Below about ₹13.4 lakh a year, Shopify is cheaper. Above it, WooCommerce is — assuming you pay somebody to maintain the WooCommerce store rather than doing it yourself. If you genuinely do your own updates and backups, WooCommerce wins everywhere and this whole table collapses. Be honest with yourself about which of those you are, because an unmaintained WooCommerce store is a security incident on a timer.
A second crossover nobody publishes
The instinct when the 2% fee starts to sting is to upgrade to Grow to get it down to 1%. Check the arithmetic first.
Grow costs roughly ₹58,000/year more than Basic and saves you 1% of sales. Upgrading pays for itself only when 1% of sales exceeds ₹58,000 — that is ₹58,00,000 in annual sales.
Below that, staying on Basic and paying the higher percentage is cheaper. The plan comparison page will not frame it that way.
The UPI thing everybody gets wrong
"UPI has zero MDR" is true and is constantly misread.
Zero MDR is a regulatory cap on the merchant discount rate — the interchange the banks would take. That genuinely is nil.
Your payment gateway is a separate business. It charges a platform/technology fee for the dashboard, reconciliation, refunds and settlement — commonly around 2%, plus 18% GST on the fee itself.
Zero MDR means the bank takes nothing. It does not mean your gateway takes nothing. If you have a low-margin catalogue and you modelled UPI orders as free, your unit economics are wrong. Read your gateway's pricing page for the specific line item.
While we are here, the full picture:
| Payment method | Typical merchant cost | What people get wrong |
|---|---|---|
| UPI | MDR zero by regulation; gateway platform fee commonly ~2% + 18% GST on the fee | Zero MDR means the bank takes nothing |
| Domestic cards | ~2% on a standard Razorpay-type account | Rates are negotiable at volume — ask once you are past a few lakh a month |
| Netbanking | Similar to cards, bank-dependent | Success rates vary by bank far more than the fee does; a failed payment costs the whole order |
| International cards | Roughly double domestic | Do not model foreign sales at the domestic rate |
| Cash on delivery | No gateway fee, but COD handling + full two-way shipping on every refusal | The most expensive method in this table, and it looks like the cheapest |
The costs that are not the platform
Platform choice is the argument everybody has. It is rarely the biggest number. What actually shows up:
- Product photography — ₹150–₹800 per product. Avoidable only if you shoot it yourself, and it will look like you shot it yourself.
- Catalogue data entry — descriptions, variants, weights, HSN codes. Several days per few hundred SKUs. Not avoidable. Someone does it: you, or someone you pay.
- Paid apps and plugins — ₹1,000–₹10,000/month if you install them. Entirely avoidable. Install nothing until a real problem demands it.
- Returns and RTO on COD — two-way shipping plus packaging on every refused order. Reducible with partial-prepaid, not avoidable.
- Domain + SSL — ₹800–₹1,500/year. Never pay for a basic SSL certificate; Let's Encrypt is free and fine.
When you should not build a store
I said I'd get here. We build e-commerce stores for a living, so weigh this accordingly — but these are real:
- You have fewer than about ten SKUs and no repeat customers. A WhatsApp catalogue and a payment link will outperform a store, at roughly zero cost.
- You have not sold the product anywhere yet. Sell thirty units through Instagram DMs first. If you cannot sell thirty by hand, a checkout page is not the constraint.
- Your margin cannot absorb ~2% plus shipping plus returns. Some catalogues genuinely cannot. Find that out on a spreadsheet, not after the build.
- Your volume is already almost entirely on Amazon or Flipkart and you are happy. A own-brand store is a marketing project, not a technical one; the site is the easy part.
- Nobody will own the catalogue. A store with stale stock and wrong prices is worse than no store.
Summary
- Shopify Payments does not operate in India, so Indian merchants pay Shopify an extra 2%/1%/0.6% (Basic/Grow/Advanced) on top of the gateway's ~2%.
- Around ₹13.4 lakh in annual sales, WooCommerce becomes cheaper than Shopify Basic — if you are paying someone to maintain it.
- Upgrading Basic → Grow does not pay for itself until about ₹58 lakh in annual sales.
- Zero MDR on UPI caps the bank's cut, not your gateway's.
- Build cost in India: ₹40,000–₹2,50,000 for the overwhelming majority of stores. Running cost: ₹31,000–₹1,36,000/year excluding gateway percentages.
Full breakdown with the build-price bands by store type, the timelines, and the FAQ: How much does an e-commerce website cost in India? (2026)
Our published price list, if you want to check the numbers I quoted for our own work: zoopcoder.com/pricing.php
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