October 08, 2026
An online store in India costs roughly 60,000 to 2,50,000 rupees to design and set up on Shopify, plus Shopify's monthly plan, payment fees and apps, or roughly 2,00,000 to 10,00,000 and above for a custom build with no platform fee. The ranges are wide because the catalogue, the pricing rules and the integrations drive the price far more than the number of products on the home page.
Which route is cheaper depends on how long you'll run the store and how unusual your business rules are. Shopify is cheaper to start and dearer to run. Custom is dearer to start and cheaper to run, and it's the only route that handles dealer pricing, multi-location stock or a Tally connection without fighting the platform.
Below is each bill line by line, then a worked example for a 200 product store and a 5,000 product one, then the running costs.
Take a store as five costs and it stops being a mystery.
Design. Someone has to decide how a product page reads, how the filters work, what the cart does on a phone and how checkout asks for as little as possible. On Shopify this is a theme built or adapted around your brand. On custom it's a full design phase with Figma files and a prototype.
Build. On Shopify, configuring the theme, products, collections, shipping and taxes, and installing the apps. On custom, building the catalogue, cart, checkout, order management and admin panel from the ground up.
Platform. Shopify charges a monthly plan. A custom store has no plan; it has hosting.
Payments. Every gateway takes a percentage. In India, Razorpay is about 2 percent on domestic cards and UPI on standard plans and more for international cards; PayU, Cashfree and PhonePe are around 1.9 to 2 percent; settlement is usually T+2 to T+3 days. Confirm current rates with the gateway, because they change.
Integrations and apps. GST invoicing, WhatsApp order updates, a courier, Tally or Zoho, reviews, back in stock alerts. On Shopify most of these are monthly apps. On custom they're built once.
About 320 people a month search this exact question in India and another 170 search "ecommerce website cost india". Almost every result they get is a single number. The five lines above are why a single number can't be right.
Design and setup: roughly 60,000 to 2,50,000 rupees. At the bottom of the band, a purchased theme with your colours, logo and products loaded, and standard apps configured. At the top, a theme designed around the brand from the ground up, custom sections for the product story, a checkout tuned for Indian buyers (cash on delivery, UPI, pincode checks) and several integrations wired and tested.
Plan: Shopify's Basic plan is around 2,000 rupees a month on annual billing in India at the time of writing. Confirm the current price on Shopify's Indian pricing page, because it has changed before. Higher plans cost more and reduce some fees.
Payments: the gateway's percentage as above. Shopify may also charge its own transaction fee on top when you use a third party gateway, and the rate depends on the plan. Article 04 goes through the Indian fee structure in full.
Apps: this is the line that surprises people in month three. Reviews, GST invoices, WhatsApp notifications, bundles, a page builder, back in stock, wishlist. Most are billed monthly in US dollars, and five or six of them together can cost as much as the plan.
Shopify wins when you want to be selling in weeks, your catalogue is straightforward, your pricing is one price per product, and you'd rather pay monthly than pay up front. It's a very good product for that store.
Roughly 2,00,000 to 10,00,000 rupees and above. The bottom of the band is a designed store with a few hundred products, standard filters, one price list, one warehouse, Razorpay or PayU, and an admin panel your team uses to manage orders and stock. The top is a catalogue in the thousands with variants, dealer and retail pricing, GST invoicing, multiple stock locations, a courier API, Tally or Zoho sync and a customer account area, with a design phase to match.
What you don't pay: a monthly platform fee, per app subscriptions, or a transaction fee to anyone except the gateway. Hosting for a custom store is normally a VPS in your own name rather than shared hosting, because a store has a database and a checkout that must not fall over during a sale. Article 06 covers what hosting costs a year.
What you do own: the source code, the design files, the hosting and every credential. You can take the store to another developer. That's the same for every project we do, but it matters more for a store, because a store is the business.
We build custom stores in PHP and MySQL with modern JavaScript, connect Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree or PhonePe for Indian payments and Stripe or PayPal for overseas buyers, and connect Tally, Zoho, HubSpot or Google Workspace where the business already runs on them. Custom is the right route when the platform would have to be bent to fit the business; our ecommerce service page lists the questions we ask to tell which is which.
The honest answer is that there are three candidates and each is best for a different store.
Shopify for a consumer brand with a clean catalogue and one price list, where speed to market matters and someone non technical will run it day to day.
WooCommerce for a business already on WordPress that wants a shop bolted on, accepts a fair amount of plugin upkeep, and has a developer who knows it. It's cheap to start and often expensive to keep healthy.
Custom for a business with rules a platform doesn't have a setting for: dealer pricing, minimum order quantities, quotes instead of carts for some products, multi-location stock, GST invoicing in the accounts system, or a catalogue in the thousands that needs its own search. Also for any store that expects to run for years, because the platform fees stop.
Article 22 puts the three side by side with an Indian lens: gateways, GST, cash on delivery and courier integration.
Say you sell 200 products, one price each, a few sizes and colours, shipping across India, cash on delivery and UPI.
On Shopify, the design and setup lands in the lower half of the 60,000 to 2,50,000 band: a good theme adapted to the brand, products loaded, GST invoicing and WhatsApp notification apps installed, Razorpay connected. It moves towards the upper half if you want the theme designed rather than adapted, or the product page built to tell a story. Then the plan, the apps and the gateway percentage every month, for as long as the store exists.
On custom, the same store lands at the bottom of the 2,00,000 to 10,00,000 band, because 200 products with simple pricing is the simplest custom store there is. Then hosting and a maintenance plan, and the gateway percentage.
For this store, Shopify is usually the right call unless you already know you'll outgrow it. The custom build costs more up front than the difference in running costs makes back for some time, and the store needs nothing a platform can't do.
Now say you make tiles, or sanitaryware, or agricultural spares: 5,000 SKUs, sizes and finishes as variants, dealer prices different from retail, some products sold by enquiry rather than cart, stock at two locations, invoices that must match Tally.
On Shopify, this store climbs to the top of the setup band and keeps going, because most of those rules need an app or custom code that fights the platform: B2B pricing, variant limits, quote requests, multi-location stock rules, and Tally sync. Each is a monthly app or a workaround, and the workarounds are where Shopify stores become fragile.
On custom, this is the store the 2,00,000 to 10,00,000 band was written for, and the position inside it depends on how many of those rules you have. Every rule is built once, into the admin panel, in the shape your business already works in.
Here the running cost gap matters. A Shopify store carrying a large app stack pays for it every month; the custom store pays hosting and maintenance. Over a few years the custom build is usually the cheaper store, and it is always the one you own.
Catalogue size and structure. Five hundred simple products cost less than fifty products with twelve variants each and a size chart per product.
Pricing rules. One price is the bottom of the band. Dealer tiers, quantity breaks, region pricing and quote only products each add a layer to the cart and the admin.
Integrations. Every system the store must talk to (gateway, courier, Tally, Zoho, WhatsApp Business API, a marketplace feed) is its own piece of work with its own testing.
Content. Product photography, descriptions and specification tables for thousands of products is a project of its own. If you supply them in a clean sheet, the quote drops.
Design. Adapting a theme is days. Designing a store around the brand, with a prototype tested on a phone before build, is weeks.
Launch checks. Speed on a throttled connection, Core Web Vitals, structured data on product pages so Google can show prices in results. Ask whether the quote includes them.
Monthly, whichever route: the gateway's percentage on every order, and a maintenance plan of roughly 1,000 to 10,000 rupees a month depending on what it covers, from backups and patches at the bottom to same day product and price changes at the top.
On Shopify, add the plan and the apps.
On custom, add hosting. Shared hosting at roughly 3,000 to 15,000 a year is fine for a brochure site; a store normally needs a VPS above that so the checkout stays up when a campaign lands. A domain is roughly 800 to 1,500 a year, and SSL is free with Let's Encrypt on most hosts.
Whatever you choose, get every account in your own name: the domain, the hosting, the gateway, the Shopify account if you go that way. A store you can't log into isn't yours. If you'd like a fixed quote for either route, the start a project form on our contact page asks the questions we need to write the brief.
To start, yes: roughly 60,000 to 2,50,000 for design and setup against 2,00,000 to 10,00,000 for custom. To run, usually no, because the plan, apps and transaction fees continue for the life of the store while a custom store pays hosting and maintenance only.
For a small catalogue with simple pricing, the lower half of the Shopify setup band or the bottom of the custom band. Where it lands depends on whether the design is adapted from a theme or built for the brand, and on how many systems the store must connect to.
Yes. Products, customers and orders export from Shopify, and a custom store can import them. The theme and app configuration don't move, so you are rebuilding the front end and the rules, which is most of the cost either way.
They're close: Razorpay about 2 percent domestic on standard plans, PayU, Cashfree and PhonePe around 1.9 to 2 percent, with settlement in T+2 to T+3 days. Choose on features (UPI coverage, international cards, subscriptions) and on how well it connects to your store, and confirm current rates before signing.
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