October 08, 2026
A Shopify store in India costs roughly 60,000 to 2,50,000 rupees to design and set up, then Shopify's plan (Basic is around 2,000 rupees a month on annual billing at the time of writing), payment gateway fees of around 2 percent per order, and whatever apps the store ends up needing. The setup range is wide because it runs from a bought theme with your products loaded to a theme designed around your brand with several integrations built and tested.
Shopify works in India; that's the first section, because a surprising number of people still ask. After that, the bill line by line: plan, charges per sale, theme, apps, development, and what the first year adds up to.
Yes. Shopify has an Indian pricing page in rupees, supports Indian payment gateways, and a great many Indian brands run on it. People still search whether it does, mostly because two things used to be awkward.
Payments. Shopify's own payment service, Shopify Payments, is not offered in India at the time of writing, so an Indian store connects a third party gateway: Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree, PhonePe, or PayPal for overseas buyers. That works fine; you set it up yourself and the gateway's fee applies. Confirm the current position, because Shopify's country list changes.
Cash on delivery. A large share of Indian online orders are COD. Shopify supports a manual payment method for it, and the usual practice is to add an app that verifies COD orders by OTP or WhatsApp before dispatch, because unverified COD orders are where returns come from.
GST invoicing, pincode based shipping and Indian address formats are all handled, with apps or settings. So the honest answer is that Shopify works in India, with a short list of Indian specifics to configure, and those specifics are part of the development cost below.
Shopify sells three main plans in India, Basic, the mid tier and Advanced, plus a lower priced Starter for selling through links and social, and Plus for large businesses. Prices are in rupees and are lower on annual billing than monthly.
Basic is around 2,000 rupees a month on annual billing at the time of writing. The higher plans cost more per month and in return reduce some per sale charges, add staff accounts and improve reporting. Most small Indian stores start on Basic and move up only when the fee savings on a higher plan outweigh its price, which happens at a fairly high monthly sales figure.
Two things to confirm on Shopify's own page before you budget: the current rupee price of each plan, and whether the price shown includes GST. About 320 people a month search "shopify india pricing", and the number moves often enough that any figure in an article, including this one, needs checking on the day.
The plan is the only Shopify cost that's fixed. Everything else scales with sales or with the apps you add.
Two charges can apply to each order, and people confuse them.
The gateway fee. Whichever gateway you connect takes a percentage of each transaction: Razorpay about 2 percent on domestic cards and UPI on standard plans, higher for international cards; PayU, Cashfree and PhonePe around 1.9 to 2 percent. Settlement to your bank is usually T+2 to T+3 days. These rates are the gateway's, not Shopify's, and they'd apply on a custom store too.
Shopify's transaction fee. In many countries Shopify adds its own percentage when you use a third party gateway instead of Shopify Payments, and the rate falls on higher plans. Because Shopify Payments isn't available in India, whether that fee applies to Indian stores, and at what rate, is the single most important line to confirm on the Indian pricing page before you sign up. It changes the maths on a store doing real volume.
Add app charges that are per order (some COD verification and shipping apps bill that way), and you have the full per sale cost. On a 2,000 rupee order at 2 percent, the gateway alone is 40 rupees; any Shopify fee is on top. Article 23 compares the gateways in detail, including refunds, webhooks and GST on the fees themselves.
This is where the 60,000 to 2,50,000 setup band splits.
A bought theme is a one time purchase from the Shopify theme store; the price is set by the theme's maker and is small against the rest of the project. The work is adapting it: colours, type, logo, home page sections, product page layout, and loading your products and collections properly. Done well, that adaptation is the bottom of the band. Done badly, it's a store that looks like every other store on the same theme.
A built theme starts from a design: what a product page needs to say for your product, how collections are browsed on a phone, what the cart and checkout ask for, how the brand looks when it isn't a logo in a corner. That design is drawn in Figma, tested as a prototype, then built as a Shopify theme in Liquid with custom sections your team can edit from the Shopify admin. That is the top of the band, and it takes weeks rather than days.
The middle of the band is the common case: a strong bought theme, three or four custom sections built for the product story, and the Indian checkout specifics done properly.
We build both, and we say which one a store needs after the written brief. A store with twelve products and a strong brand often needs the built theme; a store with four hundred products and a standard catalogue often doesn't.
Apps are the cost nobody quotes because nobody knows the list until the store is running. In our experience an Indian store usually ends up with most of these:
Most are billed monthly, usually in US dollars, and several add per order pricing above a threshold. Individually each is small. Together, five or six of them can cost as much as the plan, every month.
Two ways to keep the bill down. First, choose a theme that already has what you'd otherwise install as an app; a well built custom theme removes the page builder, the bundles app and often the reviews app. Second, review the app list every quarter and remove what isn't earning its fee.
Development on Shopify is everything between "theme installed" and "store ready to sell", and it's the reason the setup band has a top.
The list for a typical Indian store: configure products, variants, collections and filters; set up shipping zones and rates by pincode or state; configure GST; connect the gateway and test live transactions including refunds; set up COD and its verification; install and configure the apps above; build any custom sections; set up the domain, email and analytics; write the policy pages; test the whole flow on a phone over a slow connection; and train whoever will run the store.
Integrations push the cost up. Tally or Zoho sync, a marketplace feed, a WhatsApp Business API connection rather than a simple app, a dealer login or a B2B price list all need custom work or paid apps, and Shopify's own B2B features sit on its most expensive plan.
Content pushes it up too. Photographing and describing four hundred products is a project on its own, and if the studio does it the quote reflects it.
For most consumer brands with a clean catalogue and one price list, yes. You get a store that works in weeks, an admin your team can use without a developer, hosting and security handled, and a large app ecosystem for whatever comes up. The monthly costs are the price of that convenience.
It's worth it less when the store has rules Shopify doesn't have a setting for: dealer and retail pricing, quotes instead of carts, multi-location stock rules, a catalogue in the thousands, or tight integration with the accounts system. Every one of those becomes an app, a workaround or a higher plan, and after enough of them a custom store is cheaper and more stable. Article 02 puts Shopify and custom side by side with worked examples, and our ecommerce page explains which we'd recommend for a given store.
It's also worth less if you never expect to grow, because the plan continues whether you sell or not. A store doing a few orders a month may be better served by a simpler setup until it isn't.
Add it up:
Hosting and SSL are included in the plan, which is one real saving against a custom build.
The number that moves most is the first line, and what moves it is the theme decision, the integrations, and who supplies the content. Ask for those three itemised on any quote.
If you'd like a fixed quote for a Shopify store, the start a project form on our contact page collects what we need to write the brief.
Roughly 60,000 to 2,50,000 rupees for design and setup, from an adapted bought theme at the bottom to a theme designed around the brand with integrations at the top, plus the monthly plan, gateway fees and apps.
No. There's a short free trial, then a monthly plan. Basic is around 2,000 rupees a month on annual billing at the time of writing; confirm the current price on Shopify's Indian pricing page.
Your payment gateway takes about 2 percent per order. Whether Shopify adds its own transaction fee on top for Indian stores using a third party gateway depends on the plan and current policy; check that line before you sign up.
Yes, and for a small catalogue on a bought theme many owners do. The parts worth paying for are the Indian checkout specifics (GST, COD verification, gateway testing), a theme designed for the brand, and any integration with your accounts or courier.
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