October 08, 2026
For most Indian businesses selling a catalogue of standard products to consumers, Shopify is the right answer. It is the least work to run, every Indian payment gateway connects to it, and cash on delivery and GST invoicing are solved with apps. WooCommerce makes sense when you already run WordPress, want to own the hosting and have someone who will maintain it every month. A custom store is for the business whose pricing, catalogue or order flow does not fit either: dealer price lists, quotes before checkout, made to order products, or a back office that must talk to Tally and a warehouse.
That is the short version. The longer one is what we tell a client on the first call, with the Indian parts that the platform comparison pages skip because they were written for shops in Canada and California: gateways, GST, cash on delivery, and who does the daily work.
Shopify is hosted software you rent. WooCommerce is a free plugin for WordPress that you host yourself. Everything else follows from that one difference.
With Shopify you pay a monthly plan and Shopify runs the servers, the security, the checkout and the updates. You pick a theme, we design and adapt it, you add apps for what the theme does not do. The store admin works well from a phone. What you give up is depth: on the standard plans you cannot change the checkout page beyond its settings, and the store's data lives on Shopify's servers. You can export products, customers and orders as CSV files, but you cannot pick the store up and move it.
With WooCommerce you pay for hosting, install WordPress and the WooCommerce plugin, choose a theme and add plugins for the payment gateway, invoicing, shipping and whatever else. You control everything. You are also responsible for everything: WordPress updates, theme updates, plugin updates, PHP versions, backups, and the afternoon when two plugins stop agreeing and checkout goes blank. Shared hosting in India runs roughly 3,000 to 15,000 rupees a year, and a store with real traffic outgrows the cheap end of that quickly.
On cost, a Shopify store designed and set up by a studio runs roughly 60,000 to 2,50,000 rupees, plus Shopify's plan (Basic is around 2,000 rupees a month on annual billing in India at the time of writing), plus payment fees and any paid apps. The range is wide because a theme adapted with your colours and photographs is one job, and a store designed from scratch with 400 products migrated and photographed is another. Articles 02 and 04 go line by line.
Only about 10 people a month in India type this, and most of them are right to ask it. The signs that a custom store is the honest answer:
Asia Pacific Ceramic is a useful example of the last three. It is a tile exporter's site in seven languages, one of them a fully mirrored Arabic edition, with an e-catalogue, packing details and a coverage calculator for importers. It has no checkout at all, because importers do not buy container loads by card. The right build for them was a catalogue that produces enquiries, and that is a custom job no platform ships.
A custom store built on PHP and MySQL, the way we build them, runs roughly 2,00,000 to 10,00,000 rupees and above. What moves it from the bottom of that band to the top: the size and structure of the catalogue, the pricing rules, the number of integrations, the number of admin roles, and whether the design is adapted from an existing brand or created from nothing. You own the source code, the design files and the hosting at handover, and can take it to any developer.
Magento, now Adobe Commerce, is the enterprise option. The open source edition is free to download and heavy to run: it wants serious hosting, a developer who knows it, and a budget for keeping it patched. For a small or mid sized Indian business it is rarely the right answer today. The reasons people once chose it (several stores from one admin, B2B pricing tiers, very large catalogues) are the same reasons we would now suggest either Shopify's higher plans or a custom build that does exactly those things and nothing else. If someone proposes Magento for a store with 500 products and one warehouse, ask them who will maintain it in two years.
Payments are the first thing an Indian owner asks about and the least differentiated in practice.
Shopify: Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree and PhonePe are all available as payment providers for Indian stores. You paste your gateway keys, the customer pays on the gateway's page and returns. Check two things on the current plan page before you decide: whether Shopify Payments is offered in India for your business type, and whether Shopify charges its own transaction fee on top of the gateway's when you use a third party provider.
WooCommerce: each of the four gateways publishes its own WordPress plugin. They work, they need updating, and the webhook that tells your store a payment succeeded after the customer closed the tab has to be set up by hand.
Custom: the gateway is integrated directly through its API. That gives you control of the checkout (UPI intent on mobile, retry after a failed attempt, a saved cart) and it means signature verification and webhooks are your developer's responsibility, which is the way we prefer it. Fees are about 2 percent on domestic cards and UPI whichever route you take; article 23 compares the four gateways in detail.
Cash on delivery is where India differs most. Shopify has cash on delivery as a manual payment method out of the box, and apps that add a COD fee, a pincode check and an OTP or WhatsApp confirmation to cut returns. WooCommerce has COD built in and pincode plugins. A custom store lets you write the COD rules your operations team actually uses: which pincodes, which order values, which customers must prepay after two returns. Whatever the platform, unverified COD orders are the single biggest cost in Indian ecommerce, and the platform will not solve that for you.
An Indian store must issue a tax invoice with your GSTIN, the HSN or SAC code per line, and CGST plus SGST for a sale within your state or IGST for a sale outside it. A business buyer also needs their own GSTIN on the invoice to claim input credit.
Shopify: you can configure GST rates by state under tax settings, but the invoice document itself comes from an app. There are several Indian GST invoice apps that produce a print-ready PDF with the right fields. If your turnover crosses the e-invoicing threshold, the IRN and QR code still come from your accounting software, not from Shopify.
WooCommerce: tax rates are configured by hand, the CGST and SGST versus IGST logic needs a plugin or careful setup, and the invoice comes from another plugin. It works, and it is three plugins that must keep working together.
Custom: the invoice is part of the build. You set the numbering series, the state logic, the HSN code on each product, the B2B GSTIN field at checkout, and the export your accountant wants for Tally. We integrate with Tally and Zoho regularly, and the integration is usually the reason a client asks for custom in the first place.
This is the question that decides most projects, and the one owners forget to ask.
Shopify: you, or one staff member on the phone app. Adding products, seeing orders, printing labels, replying to a customer. No developer needed for months at a time, and when you do need one, most of the work is in apps and theme settings.
WooCommerce: the same in principle. In practice someone must apply WordPress, theme and plugin updates, keep backups, and be reachable the day an update breaks checkout. If that person is not on your payroll, you will pay a retainer. A maintenance plan in India runs roughly 1,000 to 10,000 rupees a month depending on what it covers, and a store sits at the top of that band.
Custom: the admin is designed for your process, in your words, so for the staff it is usually simpler than either platform: fewer screens, no features you don't use. Any new feature is a developer job, though, and there is no app store to browse. Because you own the code, that developer can be us or anyone else. Our handover includes training and documentation, hosting in your name, and a monthly plan for updates, backups and fixes if you want one.
Read down the list until you find yourself.
We build both Shopify stores and custom stores, so the recommendation is not tied to what we sell. If you tell us what you sell, to whom and at what prices, the platform usually picks itself in the first conversation.
WooCommerce is cheaper to start, because the software is free and shared hosting is a few thousand rupees a year. Over two or three years the gap narrows once you count paid plugins and the person who keeps it updated. Shopify's monthly plan is the price of not having that person.
Yes. Products, customers and orders export as CSV, and a custom build can import them. The URLs change, so plan redirects for every product and collection page before you switch, or you lose the search traffic those pages earned.
Yes. UPI comes through whichever Indian gateway you connect, and cash on delivery is a built in manual payment method. Apps add a COD fee, pincode restrictions and order confirmation.
No. Shopify apps and WooCommerce plugins both produce GST invoices. A custom store becomes worth it when the invoice must follow your own numbering, carry dealer specific terms, or land in Tally automatically.
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