Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Custom 2026: Real Cost Math India

For an Indian store in October 2026, Shopify costs Rs 1,994 a month on Basic plus 2% of every prepaid order, WooCommerce costs nothing in platform fees but Rs 1,000 to 5,000 a month in hosting and extensions plus someone to maintain it, and a custom build starts at Rs 2 lakh and only pays for itself above roughly 1,500 orders a month or when Shopify is pushing you to Plus at Rs 1,75,000 a month. Over three years at 300 orders a month the totals are about Rs 4.7 lakh on Shopify, Rs 3.6 lakh on WooCommerce and Rs 6 lakh custom. The rest of this article shows where those numbers come from and when each option wins.

I am Ashish Sharma. Codingclave has built software in Lucknow since 2017, and stores on all three of these stacks are a regular part of the 200+ projects we have shipped. Every price below was checked in October 2026 against the vendor's own pricing page, and I name the source in the sentence. Where I could not verify a figure I say so.

Shopify vs WooCommerce vs custom at a glance

	Shopify	WooCommerce	Custom build
What it is	Hosted SaaS, Shopify runs everything	Free plugin on WordPress, you host it	Next.js or React front end, Node.js or Django backend, built for you
Platform fee (Oct 2026)	Rs 1,994/mo Basic, Rs 7,447 Grow, Rs 30,164 Advanced (shopify.com/in/pricing)	Rs 0	Rs 0
Cut per prepaid order	2% Basic, 1% Grow, 0.6% Advanced, 0.2% Plus	0%	0%
Hosting	Included	Rs 600 to 5,000/mo	Rs 2,000 to 10,000/mo
Time to launch	1 to 2 weeks with an agency, a weekend alone	2 to 4 weeks	8 weeks to 8 months
Upfront cost	Rs 25,000 to 60,000 setup, theme Rs 0 to 44,000	Rs 30,000 to 2 lakh	Rs 2 lakh to 15 lakh
Checkout control	Limited below Plus	Full	Full
Who fixes it at 2 am	Shopify	You or your developer	Your developer
Best for	Launch fast, standard catalogue, no tech team	Content-led stores, tight recurring budget, WordPress users	Unusual workflows, ERP depth, Plus-level volume

What does Shopify really cost in India in 2026?

Shopify's India pricing page (shopify.com/in/pricing, checked October 2026) lists four plans. Basic is Rs 1,994 a month, or Rs 1,499 a month billed annually. Grow is Rs 7,447 (Rs 5,599 annual). Advanced is Rs 30,164 (Rs 22,680 annual). Plus starts at Rs 1,75,000 a month on a three-year term and Rs 1,90,000 on a one-year term, per Shopify's India Plus pricing page. A Starter plan also exists for selling through links and social posts; Shopify's help centre notes it cannot group products into collections or add staff accounts, so it is not a storefront and I leave it out of the comparison.

The number that matters more than the subscription is the third-party payment fee. Shopify Payments is available in around 40 countries according to the supported-countries page in Shopify's help centre, and India is not among them. Every Indian store therefore uses Razorpay, Cashfree, PayU, CCAvenue or a similar gateway, and Shopify charges its own percentage on each of those orders: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. Razorpay's standard pricing is 2% plus 18% GST on the fee, so a Basic store pays about 4.36% on a prepaid order where a WooCommerce or custom store pays about 2.36%. Cash-on-delivery orders recorded as manual payments do not attract Shopify's cut, which is why I calculate it on prepaid GMV only.

Grow becomes cheaper than Basic once the 1 percentage point you save exceeds the extra Rs 5,453 a month. That happens at roughly Rs 5.5 lakh of prepaid GMV a month, or about Rs 49 lakh a year on annual billing. Below that, stay on Basic.

Then the extras. Shopify's Theme Store listed paid themes from $280 to $500 in October 2026, roughly Rs 24,000 to Rs 44,000 one-time at current rates, and free themes including Dawn are good enough for most launches. The Shopify App Store now says it has over 16,000 apps. The ones Indian stores actually install are a GST invoice app, a WhatsApp abandoned-cart or order-update app, a Shiprocket or Delhivery connector, reviews, and a search-and-filter app once the catalogue passes a few hundred products. Each runs Rs 800 to 4,000 a month and a growing store settles at Rs 3,000 to 10,000 a month combined. Setup by a developer, meaning theme configuration, payment and shipping rules, GST settings and a few custom sections, is Rs 25,000 to 60,000 for a standard store; our Shopify developer rate guide has the per-tier hiring numbers.

Two constraints to know before you commit. Shopify's help centre states that apps customising the checkout information, shipping and payment pages, and the Checkout Branding API, are Plus-only; on Basic to Advanced you can edit the thank-you and order status pages and use the checkout editor's branding settings. And Shopify's URL structure is fixed: Shopify's theme documentation defines the routes, products live under /products/ and collections under /collections/, and there is no setting to remove the prefixes.

Shopify cost line	Figure (Oct 2026)	Source
Basic / Grow / Advanced, monthly	Rs 1,994 / 7,447 / 30,164	shopify.com/in/pricing
Same, billed annually	Rs 1,499 / 5,599 / 22,680 per month	shopify.com/in/pricing
Plus	From Rs 1,75,000/mo (3-year) or Rs 1,90,000/mo (1-year)	shopify.com/in/plus/pricing
Third-party payment fee	2% / 1% / 0.6% / 0.2%	shopify.com/in/pricing
Gateway fee (Razorpay standard)	2% + 18% GST, Rs 0 setup, Rs 0 AMC	razorpay.com/pricing
Paid themes	$280 to $500 one-time	themes.shopify.com
POS Pro add-on	Rs 7,000/mo per location	shopify.com/in/pricing

What does WooCommerce really cost in India in 2026?

The plugin is free and there is no platform fee and no per-order cut. What you pay for is everything around it.

Hosting is the first line. Hostinger's India WordPress hosting page (October 2026) lists its Cloud Startup plan at Rs 599 a month on a 48-month prepaid term, renewing at Rs 1,599 a month; its cheaper shared plans at Rs 69 to 249 a month introductory are fine for a blog and too slow for a store with real traffic. Cloudways' entry DigitalOcean server with 2 GB RAM is $11 a month, about Rs 920. For a store doing a few hundred orders a month I budget Rs 1,000 to 2,000 a month; for 1,500 orders a month with a large catalogue, Rs 4,000 to 6,000 for a server with enough RAM and a proper object cache.

Extensions are the second line, and WooCommerce.com now prices them in rupees for Indian buyers. Product Bundles was Rs 7,660 a year and WooCommerce Subscriptions Rs 27,050 a year in October 2026. Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree and CCAvenue maintain free official payment plugins, and Shiprocket's connector is free. A GST invoice plugin runs Rs 3,000 to 6,000 a year. Most stores end up with Rs 10,000 to 40,000 a year in paid plugins, more if they sell subscriptions.

Maintenance is the line that WooCommerce cost calculators leave out. WordPress core, the theme, WooCommerce and every plugin ship updates monthly, and a store that is not updated gets compromised or breaks at checkout. If you will not do this yourself, a retainer of Rs 1,500 to 3,000 a month covers updates, backups and uptime checks for a small store, and Rs 15,000 to 25,000 a month covers performance work and fixes for a busy one. Our WordPress development team runs these retainers, and in my experience the stores that skip them are the ones that call us after a hack.

Setup by a developer costs Rs 30,000 to 80,000 for a store on a premium theme with standard plugins, and Rs 1 to 2 lakh when you want a custom theme, a custom checkout flow or integration with Tally or an ERP.

WooCommerce cost line	Figure (Oct 2026)	Source
Plugin and platform fee	Rs 0	woocommerce.com
Managed hosting, small store	Rs 599/mo intro, Rs 1,599/mo renewal (Hostinger Cloud Startup)	hostinger.com/in
Managed hosting, cloud server	$11/mo for 2 GB RAM (Cloudways DigitalOcean)	cloudways.com
Product Bundles extension	Rs 7,660/year	woocommerce.com
Subscriptions extension	Rs 27,050/year	woocommerce.com
Gateway fee	2% + GST (Razorpay), official plugin free	razorpay.com/pricing
Maintenance retainer	Rs 1,500 to 25,000/mo by volume	Codingclave rate card

What does a custom ecommerce build cost in India in 2026?

Custom means a storefront built for you, usually in Next.js or React, with a Node.js or Django backend on PostgreSQL, deployed to Vercel, AWS or a VPS. No subscription, no per-order cut, no theme or app marketplace either: everything you want has to be built or integrated.

At Codingclave rates in October 2026 the tiers look like this. A lean single-brand store with a catalogue, cart, Razorpay checkout, COD, Shiprocket, GST invoices and an admin panel is Rs 2 to 4 lakh and 8 to 12 weeks. A full build that adds ERP or warehouse integration, B2B price lists, bundles, subscriptions or multi-warehouse inventory is Rs 6 to 15 lakh and 4 to 8 months. A marketplace with vendor onboarding, commission and payout logic is Rs 15 lakh upward. Hosting is Rs 2,000 to 10,000 a month, and a maintenance retainer for monitoring, security patches and small changes is Rs 20,000 to 50,000 a month. The broader figures in our ecommerce website cost guide match these.

Custom build tier	Scope	Cost (Oct 2026)	Timeline
Lean storefront	Catalogue, cart, Razorpay + COD, Shiprocket, GST invoices, admin	Rs 2 to 4 lakh	8 to 12 weeks
Full build	Above plus ERP/WMS integration, B2B pricing, bundles or subscriptions, multi-warehouse	Rs 6 to 15 lakh	4 to 8 months
Marketplace	Multi-vendor onboarding, commissions, payouts, disputes	Rs 15 lakh+	6 to 12 months
Running cost	Hosting Rs 2,000 to 10,000/mo, retainer Rs 20,000 to 50,000/mo

The honest trade-off is that a custom build costs more than Shopify or WooCommerce at almost every volume below Plus. You buy it for control and margin at scale, not to save money in year one.

Three-year cost at 50, 300 and 1,500 orders a month

This is the table I wish existed when founders ask me which to pick. Same store, three volumes, three stacks, three years.

Assumptions: average order Rs 1,200, 40% prepaid and 60% COD, which is typical for a mid-ticket D2C brand selling outside the metros. Gateway at Razorpay's standard 2% plus 18% GST on prepaid orders, charged identically on all three stacks. Shopify's cut applied to prepaid GMV only. Agency setup where a developer is realistically needed. Hosting for the custom rows at Rs 2,000 a month at 50 and 300 orders. The Rs 15,000 Shopify theme line in the 300-order row buys a free theme with a few custom sections or a third-party theme; a Theme Store theme adds about Rs 10,000 to year one. WooCommerce theme and plugin renewals counted every year. Figures rounded to the nearest thousand.

Orders/month (annual GMV)	Stack	Year 1	Year 2 onward	3-year total
50 (Rs 7.2 lakh)	Shopify Basic, free theme, Rs 1,500/mo apps, Rs 25,000 setup	Rs 80,000	Rs 54,000	Rs 1.88 lakh
50	WooCommerce, Rs 1,000/mo hosting, Rs 10,000/yr plugins, Rs 30,000 setup, Rs 1,500/mo retainer	Rs 76,000	Rs 46,000	Rs 1.67 lakh
50	Custom lean build Rs 2 lakh, Rs 3,000/mo retainer	Rs 2.67 lakh	Rs 67,000	Rs 4.0 lakh
300 (Rs 43.2 lakh)	Shopify Basic, Rs 15,000 theme, Rs 3,000/mo apps, Rs 50,000 setup	Rs 2.0 lakh	Rs 1.35 lakh	Rs 4.7 lakh
300	WooCommerce, Rs 1,000/mo hosting, Rs 15,000/yr theme and plugins, Rs 50,000 setup, Rs 3,000/mo retainer	Rs 1.54 lakh	Rs 1.04 lakh	Rs 3.6 lakh
300	Custom lean build Rs 3 lakh, Rs 3,000/mo retainer	Rs 4.0 lakh	Rs 1.0 lakh	Rs 6.0 lakh
1,500 (Rs 2.16 crore)	Shopify Grow annual, Rs 10,000/mo apps, Rs 1.5 lakh setup, Rs 15,000/mo developer	Rs 8.1 lakh	Rs 6.6 lakh	Rs 21.2 lakh
1,500	WooCommerce, Rs 5,000/mo hosting, Rs 30,000/yr plugins, Rs 1.5 lakh setup, Rs 20,000/mo retainer	Rs 6.8 lakh	Rs 5.3 lakh	Rs 17.5 lakh
1,500	Custom full build Rs 8 lakh, Rs 5,000/mo hosting, Rs 30,000/mo retainer	Rs 14.2 lakh	Rs 6.2 lakh	Rs 26.7 lakh

Four things fall out of that table.

WooCommerce is the cheapest at every volume, but by 10 to 25%, not the half-price that its fans quote. The saving is Shopify's subscription and per-order cut; the cost that eats into it is paying someone to keep WordPress healthy. If you would do neither, Shopify is cheaper in practice because an unmaintained WooCommerce store eventually costs you a weekend of downtime or a cleanup bill.

Shopify's percentage is the real cost, not the plan price. At 300 orders a month Shopify's 2% on prepaid orders is Rs 34,560 a year, more than the Rs 23,928 subscription. At 1,500 orders a month the move to Grow pays for itself because the saved percentage point is worth Rs 86,400 a year against Rs 49,200 of extra subscription on annual billing.

Custom loses on pure cost at all three volumes, and at 1,500 orders the three-year gap is about Rs 5.5 lakh against Shopify Grow and Rs 9 lakh against WooCommerce. That is the price of owning your checkout, your data model and your page speed. It is worth paying when those things change your conversion or your margin, and not before.

Custom wins once Plus enters the picture. A Plus subscription is Rs 21 to 23 lakh a year before the 0.2% and before apps. A custom store's running cost at the same volume is Rs 6 to 7 lakh a year, so an Rs 8 to 15 lakh build pays back in 12 to 18 months. That is the one scenario where I tell founders the custom route is the frugal one.

Which handles UPI, COD and Indian payments best?

All three take UPI, cards, netbanking and wallets through Razorpay, Cashfree, PayU or CCAvenue, and all three support cash on delivery. The differences are in fees and control.

On Shopify you pay the gateway plus Shopify's cut on every prepaid order because Shopify Payments is not available in India. The official Razorpay and Cashfree apps handle UPI intent on mobile properly, which matters because the RBI's payment system indicators put UPI at about four in five digital payment transactions in India by volume. COD is a built-in manual payment method, but blocking COD for risky pincodes or charging a COD fee needs an app.

On WooCommerce you pay only the gateway. The official Razorpay plugin is free and supports UPI, cards, EMI and recurring payments; COD is native with per-state and per-method rules, and there are free plugins for COD fees and pincode checks.

On a custom build you integrate the gateway's API directly, which lets you do things the other two cannot without workarounds: partial COD advance via UPI, COD limits per customer based on return history, or a different gateway per payment method to shave fees. For a brand fighting return-to-origin on COD, that control is a real lever; our RTO playbook goes through the tactics. Choosing the gateway itself is a separate decision, covered in our Razorpay vs Stripe vs PayU vs Cashfree comparison.

GST invoicing is a small but real difference. Shopify and WooCommerce both need a paid app or plugin to produce a compliant tax invoice with GSTIN, HSN codes and CGST/SGST or IGST split by destination state. A custom build does it the way your accountant wants from day one.

Which is better for SEO and content?

Shopify handles the technical basics well and without effort: fast hosting, automatic sitemap, canonical tags, mobile themes. What you cannot change is the URL structure (/products/ and /collections/ are fixed), robots.txt beyond Shopify's template editor, and deep schema customisation without an app or theme edits. Its blog is adequate for a few posts a month and poor for a content operation with categories, authors and custom content types.

WooCommerce on WordPress gives full control of URLs, schema, internal linking and content types, and the best editorial tooling of the three. If guides, comparisons and buyer content are a major traffic channel, WooCommerce is the natural fit. The cost is that speed is your problem: a heavy theme plus twenty plugins on cheap hosting will lose Core Web Vitals to a stock Shopify store, so budget for caching, image optimisation and a real server.

A custom Next.js store can be the fastest of the three and gives complete control over every SEO detail, but only if the team builds sitemaps, structured data, canonical handling and a content model on purpose. We have inherited custom stores that had none of it. If content is central and you go custom, pair the storefront with a headless CMS; our headless CMS comparison covers the options.

Which is easiest to run day to day?

Shopify is the easiest by a distance. The admin is the best in the business, the mobile app is complete, support is 24/7 chat, and security, PCI compliance, backups and updates are Shopify's problem. A founder with no technical staff can run a Shopify store alone.

WooCommerce is manageable for anyone comfortable with WordPress, and a nightmare for anyone who is not. Updates, plugin conflicts, backups and security are yours. Support is the plugin authors' documentation, your host's chat, and your developer. The upside is that nothing is locked: any behaviour can be changed with a plugin or a few lines of PHP.

A custom build sits at the other end. Day-to-day order and catalogue management can be as simple as you design it, but every change, every bug and every security patch goes through your developer. You need a retainer or an in-house engineer from day one.

How far does each scale before it breaks?

Shopify scales as far as you can pay for. Catalogues of tens of thousands of products and sales spikes are routine. The ceilings are commercial, not technical: Plus pricing at Rs 1.75 lakh a month, checkout customisation only on Plus, and an app bill that grows with every feature.

WooCommerce scales well to a few thousand products and a few thousand orders a month on a properly tuned server. Past roughly 8,000 to 10,000 products or heavy concurrent traffic, the admin slows, search needs an external index like Algolia or Elasticsearch, and database tuning becomes a recurring job. It is solvable, but at that point you are paying for engineering either way.

A custom build scales the way you designed it. Done well, it handles any catalogue size and traffic with search, caching and a CDN built in. Done badly, it breaks on the first big sale. The quality of the team matters more than the stack.

The fourth option: Shopify's backend with a custom storefront

The comparison is usually framed as three choices, but a fourth has become practical. Shopify's Storefront API lets you keep Shopify for products, orders, inventory, apps and checkout while building the customer-facing site in Next.js or Shopify's own Hydrogen framework. You get a storefront as fast and as custom as a full build, with Shopify running the back office.

It is not cheap: the storefront build is Rs 3 to 8 lakh, you still pay the Shopify subscription and its per-order cut, and checkout customisation limits still apply unless you are on Plus. It makes sense for brands with design-led storefronts, heavy content, or multi-brand setups that want one admin. For most stores under 1,500 orders a month it is more than you need.

Which should you choose?

Choose Shopify if you want to be live within two weeks, your catalogue is standard, you have no technical staff, and you can live with roughly 4.4% all-in on prepaid orders. Below Rs 50 lakh a year in GMV the fees are a rounding error against the time you save.

Choose WooCommerce if content is a major channel, your recurring budget is tight, you or someone you pay already knows WordPress, or your prepaid share is high enough that Shopify's percentage hurts. Set the maintenance retainer up on day one.

Choose a custom build if your workflows genuinely do not fit a platform (B2B price lists, bundle logic, multi-warehouse allocation, unusual checkout rules), if you are at or near Plus-level volume, if ERP and warehouse integration is central to the business, or if you are building a marketplace. Do not choose it to save money below 1,500 orders a month; the table above shows it will not.

If you are between the first two and cannot decide, the tie-breaker is simple: who will keep the site updated and secure? If the answer is nobody, Shopify.

How hard is it to switch later?

Easier than most founders fear, harder than migration tools promise. Products, customers and orders export from Shopify as CSV and import into WooCommerce or a custom database with mapping work; the parts that take time are redirects for every old URL, re-connecting Razorpay, Shiprocket and your WhatsApp tools, and rebuilding app behaviour that lived only in Shopify. A Shopify-to-WooCommerce or Shopify-to-custom move for a mid-size store is 4 to 8 weeks and Rs 1 to 3 lakh in our projects, on top of the build itself. Moving into Shopify from WooCommerce is faster because Shopify's importer handles the basics and the apps exist for the rest.

The old advice to start on Shopify, graduate to WooCommerce, then go custom is wrong in my experience. Each migration costs money and ranking. Pick the stack that fits your next three years, and plan to migrate once, if ever.

What we see in projects

Three patterns from our own work. First, founders overestimate how custom their requirements are. Most of the "Shopify cannot do this" requests we get are solved by an app or a theme section for under Rs 30,000. Second, WooCommerce stores that fail usually fail for one reason: nobody owned updates. The stores on a retainer run for years. Third, the custom builds that paid off were all at Plus-level volume or had integration needs (an existing ERP, multi-warehouse stock, B2B dealer pricing) that no platform handled cleanly. The ones that did not pay off were built too early.

If you want a second opinion on your own numbers, send us your monthly orders, average order value and prepaid share and we will tell you which column you are in, including when the answer is to stay where you are. If you are weighing a freelancer against an agency for the build itself, our freelancer vs agency comparison covers that decision separately.