Short version: if you sell physical products direct to consumers and you don't have an engineering team, Shopify is still the right default in 2026. The parts that have improved most since 2023 are checkout (extensibility, one-page checkout, Shop Pay), B2B on Plus, and Markets for selling across India, the GCC and the US from one admin. The parts that still bite are the transaction fee if you're in a country without Shopify Payments, native search and filtering on large catalogues, and the way your monthly app bill quietly doubles in year two. This Shopify review is written from the inside of merchant accounts we work in daily, so it leads with the bill rather than the feature list.
What you actually pay
At the time of writing the three self-serve plans sit at roughly $39, $105 and $399 a month on monthly billing, with a meaningful discount on annual. There's also a cut-down Starter plan for around $5 that gives you checkout links without a full storefront. Shopify Plus starts near $2,300 a month on a three-year commitment, or $2,500 month to month, and moves to a percentage of GMV once you're big enough for that to be the larger number. Indian merchants are billed in rupees, and the INR figures move with the exchange rate, so check the pricing page in your admin rather than trusting any article, including this one.
Plan price is the small number. The one that decides your plan is the transaction fee.
The part most Shopify reviews skip: the transaction fee maths
If you don't use Shopify Payments, Shopify charges a platform fee on every order on top of whatever your gateway charges. Roughly 2% on Basic, 1% on the mid plan, 0.6% on Advanced, and a fraction of that on Plus. Shopify Payments still isn't live in India, so Indian merchants pay this on essentially every card, UPI and net-banking order routed through Razorpay, Cashfree or PayU.
Here's the arithmetic that actually decides your plan. Say you're doing ₹40 lakh a month in prepaid GMV. On the mid plan that's ₹40,000 a month in Shopify platform fees. On Advanced, at 0.6%, it's ₹24,000. You save ₹16,000. But the plan gap between mid and Advanced is somewhere around ₹25,000 a month depending on the rupee that week. So at ₹40 lakh you lose money by upgrading.
Break-even is where 0.4% of prepaid GMV equals the plan gap: ₹25,000 ÷ 0.004 = ₹62.5 lakh a month. Under that, stay put. Over it, upgrade the same day. Run this with your own numbers before your next renewal — we've seen stores sitting on Advanced at ₹18 lakh a month because someone upgraded for the reporting, and stores on Basic at ₹55 lakh burning ₹77,000 a month in avoidable 2% fees.
One wrinkle for India: COD orders don't carry a gateway charge, and whether Shopify's platform fee applies depends on how the order is captured. Check a month of real payouts rather than assuming. If half your revenue is cash on delivery, your effective fee rate is far below the headline, and the upgrade break-even moves a long way up.
The app bill nobody budgets for
A functional Indian D2C store on Shopify usually carries a gateway app, a shipping and COD-verification layer, reviews, email and SMS, a bundles or upsell app, and a filter or search app once the catalogue passes a few hundred SKUs. Call it ₹12,000 to ₹35,000 a month once you're past launch, and it grows because nobody ever uninstalls anything. Every one of those apps also injects script into your storefront.
Two habits fix most of this. Audit the app list every quarter and uninstall anything nobody has opened in 60 days, checking that leftover theme code goes with it. And before you install an app for a small piece of merchandising logic, price the alternative — a metafield and twenty lines of Liquid often does the job for a one-time cost instead of ₹1,500 a month forever. We've broken down where that money goes in more detail in our guide to Shopify development costs in India.
What Shopify is genuinely good at
Checkout. It converts, it's PCI-handled, it survives traffic spikes you didn't plan for, and Shop Pay's stored-card flow is faster than anything you'd build. During a Diwali flash sale where a self-hosted store would be tuning PHP-FPM workers at 11pm, Shopify merchants are watching a dashboard. That reliability is most of what you're paying for.
Uptime during festive peaks is the underrated benefit. So is the admin: a warehouse coordinator can learn order fulfilment in a morning. Themes built on Online Store 2.0 give marketers real control over sections and blocks without touching code, which matters more than it sounds — it's the difference between a landing page shipping today and shipping in a fortnight.
Markets is the other genuine improvement. Selling in INR to India and AED to the UAE off one catalogue, with local domains and local pricing rules, used to mean multiple stores and duplicated inventory. It doesn't now.
Where Shopify still hurts
Checkout customisation below Plus. Since checkout.liquid was retired, checkout changes happen through Checkout Extensibility apps and UI extensions. That's more stable than the old script hacks, but the ceiling is real. Custom shipping logic, complex discount stacking, field-level control over the address form — several of those still need Plus, Shopify Functions, or both.
Search and filtering at scale. Native filters work fine up to a few hundred products with clean tags. Past that, on a catalogue with size, colour, fabric and occasion variants, the default experience puts customers in front of a collection page they can't narrow usefully. Site search is worse — it's largely keyword matching, so a shopper typing "kurta for mehendi" finds nothing. This is the single most common conversion leak we find on Indian fashion and jewellery stores with 800+ SKUs, and it's why we built FilterPro for smart filters and AI search rather than fighting the theme's defaults.
Reporting. Shopify Analytics tells you what happened. It's poor at cohorts, weak at attribution, and blended CAC is something you'll end up computing in a spreadsheet or a BI tool regardless of plan. Don't upgrade for reports.
Content. The blog engine is basic. If content is a real acquisition channel for you, plan on metaobjects, a custom template and some patience, or accept that your editorial experience will be worse than WordPress. We work around this often as part of SEO and content work, but it's a workaround.
Theme and app weight. Every app you add costs you milliseconds. A theme that launched at a 1.8s LCP is at 3.4s eighteen months later, and nobody noticed because it degraded gradually. Speed is a maintenance task on Shopify, not a one-time build task.
The India-specific realities
No Shopify Payments means you're choosing a gateway yourself and paying Shopify's fee on top. Razorpay is the common default; check the app's handling of refunds and partial captures before you commit, because that's where integrations get ugly.
COD needs work Shopify won't do for you: pin-code serviceability, a COD fee, RTO control, and OTP or WhatsApp verification on high-value orders. Assume an app or two here.
GST invoicing is not native. You'll need an app or a middleware connection to your accounting system to issue compliant invoices with HSN codes, and B2B customers will ask for GSTIN capture at checkout. Food and supplement sellers need FSSAI licence details and mandatory declarations on the PDP — build that into the product template rather than leaving it to whoever writes descriptions.
Jewellery is its own case. Metal rates move daily and a static price list is wrong by lunchtime, so live rate-linked pricing with a visible breakup of metal, making charge, wastage and GST isn't a nicety, it's what the customer expects to see before they'll buy a ₹80,000 chain online.
When Shopify Plus is worth it, and when it isn't
Plus pays for itself in three situations: your third-party transaction fees alone are approaching the licence cost, you need real checkout control or Functions-based discount logic, or you need proper B2B with company accounts, price lists and net terms alongside your D2C store. Multi-store for separate markets is a fourth, weaker reason now that Markets covers a lot of it.
It is not worth it because you want better support, or because a competitor is on it, or because someone said headless. We've talked founders out of Plus more than once — at ₹2 crore a year in revenue, the licence is most of a marketing hire, and the marketing hire will do more. If you want a second opinion on the timing, our Shopify Plus practice page sets out the thresholds we use.
Shopify versus the alternatives, briefly
WooCommerce is cheaper on paper and stops being cheaper the first time you need a developer on a Sunday. It's the right call if you have in-house PHP skills or genuinely unusual content requirements.
Wix and Squarespace are fine for a catalogue under 50 products and no operational complexity. They fall over on multi-warehouse inventory and serious app ecosystems.
Adobe Commerce or a custom build make sense for complex B2B pricing, ERP-driven catalogues in the tens of thousands, or regulatory requirements Shopify's checkout can't accommodate. The cost of ownership is several times higher and you own every security patch.
Most brands that ask us to compare end up on Shopify. The ones that shouldn't have are usually running marketplaces or subscription businesses with billing logic Shopify's own subscription APIs won't express cleanly.
Who Shopify is for in 2026
A good fit: D2C brands from first sale to roughly ₹100 crore, anyone selling across India and the Gulf or India and the US, teams where marketing needs to ship pages without a developer, and businesses whose competitive edge is product and acquisition rather than technology.
A poor fit: multi-vendor marketplaces, businesses with more than a few thousand SKUs that also need deep configurator logic, and anyone whose checkout must do something Shopify has explicitly decided not to allow. Find that out before you migrate, not after.
If you're already on Shopify and unsure whether you're overpaying or under-configured, pull three numbers this week: last month's Shopify platform transaction fees, total app spend, and your storefront LCP on a mid-range Android over 4G. Those three tell you more than any feature comparison. We'll look at them with you in a free store audit if you'd rather not do it alone.