Disclosure: I work at ZoopCoder, an Indian dev shop, and we sell a paid fixed-price Shopify setup. Every Shopify number below is Shopify's own published India price and is billed by Shopify, not by us — none of it reaches us. The one paid thing we sell is flagged clearly at the end. Verify the rates on Shopify's site before you plan around them; they move.
Every "how much does Shopify cost" article you will find is written for a merchant in the US, the UK or Australia. For an Indian seller, all of them are wrong in the same specific way, and it is not the subscription price.
Here is the actual arithmetic for India as at September 2026.
1. The subscription (Shopify's own India price list)
From shopify.com/in/pricing:
| Plan | Pay monthly | Pay yearly |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | ₹1,994/mo | ₹1,499/mo |
| Grow | ₹7,447/mo | ₹5,599/mo |
| Advanced | ₹30,164/mo | ₹22,680/mo |
| Plus | from ₹1,75,000/mo | — |
And, verbatim from the same page's FAQ: "There are no setup fees on any of our plans."
So the headline is ₹1,994 a month, or ₹17,988 a year if you commit annually. That is the number everyone quotes. It is also the number that matters least.
2. The thing that is different in India: Shopify Payments doesn't operate here
Shopify publishes a list of supported countries for Shopify Payments. As I write this it runs from Australia and Austria through to the UAE, the UK and the US — 40-odd countries.
India is not on it.
That has one direct consequence, which Shopify also states plainly in its pricing FAQ:
Third-party transaction fees may apply when you use a third-party payment provider (instead of Shopify Payments). The rate depends on your plan.
Put those two facts together and you get the India-specific outcome: every Indian Shopify store must use a third-party gateway — Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree, PhonePe — which means every Indian Shopify store pays Shopify's third-party transaction fee on every order. There is no configuration that avoids it, because the thing that would avoid it isn't available here.
A merchant in a supported country can switch that fee off by turning Shopify Payments on. You cannot. That is the asymmetry nobody's cost comparison mentions.
3. And then there's GST on the gateway fee
Second India-only line item, and an easy one to under-budget. A standard Razorpay/PayU/Cashfree account is around 2% per transaction on domestic cards — and 18% GST is charged on that fee, which makes the real rate about 2.36%.
On ₹50,00,000 of annual sales that's ₹1,18,000, not ₹1,00,000. An ₹18,000/year line that appears in exactly zero comparison tables published outside India.
One more, if you are GST-registered: Shopify bills its subscription from outside India, so the reverse charge mechanism applies — you pay the GST to the government yourself and claim it back. Net zero if you are registered, a real 18% if you are not. Ask your CA, not a blog post, about your own position.
4. So what does it actually cost to run?
Stack the three layers for a Basic-plan store:
- Subscription: ₹1,994/mo (₹1,499/mo yearly)
- Shopify's third-party transaction fee: a percentage of every order, unavoidable in India, rate depends on plan
- Gateway + GST: ~2.36% of every order
The first number is fixed. The other two scale with your revenue — and that is the whole decision, because WooCommerce's cost structure is the opposite shape: nothing for the software, everything in hosting and maintenance labour, which stays roughly flat as sales grow.
Two lines with different slopes cross somewhere. We did that arithmetic at four revenue levels for the Indian market — including where the crossover actually sits and the case for not building a store at all below a certain volume — in what an e-commerce website costs in India.
The short version of that guide, so you don't have to click:
- Under ~₹2 lakh/year in online sales: don't build a store. A WhatsApp Business catalogue and a payment link take an afternoon and cost nothing but the transaction fee.
- ~₹2 lakh to ~₹13 lakh/year: Shopify. The subscription plus its cut is cheaper than paying somebody in India to keep WooCommerce patched, and it is dramatically less work.
- Above ~₹13 lakh/year: the lines cross and WooCommerce starts winning, because Shopify's percentage keeps climbing with your revenue and maintenance labour doesn't.
That recommendation sends most small sellers away from the larger project, which is the opposite of what an agency blog usually does. It is also just what the maths says.
5. What setup actually involves
A blank Shopify store does not sell. What it needs before it can take a rupee:
- A theme customised enough not to look like a demo (free themes are fine; the licence for a paid one is yours to buy)
- Products with real variants and collections, not a flat list
- A gateway connected and KYC-approved — this is usually the long pole, not the design
- Shipping zones, rates and COD, which in India is still a large share of orders
- GST tax settings
- Refund, privacy, shipping and terms pages — gateways ask for these during approval, and a missing shipping policy is a very common reason an Indian gateway application stalls
- A real end-to-end test order before you announce anything
None of that is hard. All of it is fiddly, and the gateway approval step has a queue you don't control.
If you'd rather not, ZoopCoder does it as a fixed price: Shopify store setup — ₹14,999, 7-10 working days, up to 30 products, gateway connected, COD, shipping, GST, domain, policy pages and a live test order before handover. The Shopify plan stays on your own account and your own card — we work as staff on your store and that access can be removed the day we hand over.
The one-line summary
Shopify in India is ₹1,994/month plus a percentage you cannot switch off, because Shopify Payments doesn't operate here. Budget the percentage, not the subscription. Below about ₹13 lakh a year in sales, it's still the right platform for most sellers — it's just not as cheap as the international articles make it look.
Top comments (0)