Budget for a Shopify store in India in two columns, not one. The build is a one-time number: somewhere between ₹35,000 and ₹4 lakh depending on who does it and how much of the theme gets rewritten. The running cost is the one that surprises people. Plan fee, gateway MDR, COD remittance charges, RTO write-offs, shipping, GST invoicing, a handful of apps. On a store doing ₹1.2 crore a year with 60% cash on delivery, those lines add up to roughly ₹9.8 lakh in twelve months. We show that arithmetic below, and you can check every step of it.
Founders who ask us about Shopify website cost in India almost always mean design and development. That's the smallest number in the model.
What Shopify itself charges, per month, in rupees
Shopify bills Indian merchants in INR. At the time of writing, Basic sits around ₹2,000 a month on annual billing and closer to ₹2,700 if you pay monthly; the mid Shopify plan is roughly three and a half times that; Advanced is an order of magnitude higher and only earns its keep if you need its reporting or third-party calculated shipping rates. Shopify moves these prices, so open the pricing page before you build a spreadsheet on my numbers.
Two things about the plan tier that matter more than the price difference:
- Basic is genuinely enough for most stores under ₹1 crore a year. The features you actually miss on Basic are extra staff accounts and lower shipping label discounts, neither of which is worth ₹5,000 a month early on.
- Annual billing is the single easiest saving available. It's the same product for roughly a quarter less. If cash flow permits, take it.
Shopify subscription and GST: the reverse charge bit
Shopify invoices from outside India. If you add your GSTIN in the billing settings, the invoice generally comes to you without GST added and the 18% IGST is your liability under reverse charge, which you pay and then claim as input tax credit. If you don't add a GSTIN, expect 18% on top with nothing to claim back. So an Indian company with a valid registration effectively pays the base rupee price; an unregistered seller pays ₹2,360 where the registered one pays ₹2,000. Get your CA to confirm the treatment in your returns, but do add the GSTIN. Same logic applies to app subscriptions billed through Shopify.
How much it costs to build a Shopify store in India
Real ranges from work we quote every week:
- ₹25,000 to ₹60,000. A free theme like Dawn, your logo, your products, basic pages, one gateway, one shipping app. A competent freelancer does this in a fortnight. Nothing wrong with it for a first launch.
- ₹1.5 lakh to ₹4 lakh. Premium theme, custom sections, proper collection architecture, size guides, bundling, review and WhatsApp integration, GST-compliant invoicing, a real mobile design pass, analytics and consent set up correctly. This is where most funded D2C brands land.
- ₹8 lakh and up. Custom app work, ERP or WMS integration, marketplace and ONDC feeds, multi-store or multi-currency setups, headless front ends. Only sensible when there's a system on the other side that has to talk to Shopify.
Add photography, which founders forget until launch week. Flat white-background shots run ₹400 to ₹1,200 per SKU at most Bengaluru and Delhi studios. A model shoot with styling and a location is ₹60,000 to ₹1.5 lakh a day. For a 40-SKU apparel launch, photography frequently costs more than the website. We've broken the build side down line by line in our guide to Shopify development cost in India.
A premium theme is a one-time USD 300-ish licence, so about ₹25,000, and it is usually money well spent versus paying a developer to rebuild Dawn's sections.
Payment gateway charges: Razorpay, PayU and the UPI discount
Shopify Payments isn't available in India, so you'll be on Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree or a similar aggregator. Standard published pricing from most of them is around 2% per transaction on domestic cards, net banking and wallets, plus 18% GST on the fee. That makes the effective rate about 2.36%. International cards are typically 3% plus GST. Rates are negotiable above a few crore a year in TPV; ask.
UPI is the line that changes your economics. There is no MDR on UPI collections, so every order you shift from card to UPI costs you nothing to process. Putting UPI intent and QR at the top of the checkout options, above cards, is a five-minute change that pays for itself forever.
One thing to verify in your admin before you model anything: Shopify levies an additional transaction fee on third-party gateways in markets where Shopify Payments operates. Check what your plan's fee line actually says for your store rather than assuming it's zero.
Cash on delivery is a cost line, not a checkbox
Two separate charges hide behind that toggle.
First, COD remittance. Shiprocket, Delhivery and the rest charge for collecting and returning your cash, typically the higher of a flat amount around ₹35 to ₹40 per shipment or about 1.5% of the order value. Read "whichever is higher" carefully. On a ₹1,200 order, 1.5% is ₹18, so you pay the ₹40 flat fee, which is 3.3% of the order. Low AOV plus COD is the most expensive combination in Indian eCommerce and almost nobody models it that way.
Second, RTO. Refused and undelivered COD parcels come back to you having consumed forward freight, return freight, packaging, warehouse handling and the entire ad spend that produced the order. In our experience COD RTO commonly runs from the high teens to the high twenties as a percentage of COD orders, worse on Meta-driven impulse categories and worse again in the week after a festive sale. Prepaid RTO is a fraction of that.
Which is why the highest-ROI development work on most Indian stores is not a redesign. It's a partial-COD deposit of ₹100 to ₹200, an OTP or WhatsApp confirmation step on COD orders above a threshold, pincode-level COD blocking on your worst 50 pincodes, and a small prepaid discount displayed at checkout. That package is a few days of work and it moves a number that costs lakhs a year.
A full year, costed
Take a store doing 1,000 orders a month at ₹1,200 AOV. ₹12 lakh monthly revenue, ₹1.44 crore a year. 60% COD, which is normal outside metros. CAC of ₹250 per order.
- Prepaid MDR. 400 prepaid orders = ₹4.8 lakh. Say half of that comes through UPI at zero cost and half through cards and net banking at 2.36%: ₹2.4 lakh × 2.36% = ₹5,664 a month.
- COD remittance. 600 orders × ₹40 = ₹24,000 a month. Note that this is four times the MDR bill, on the same revenue base.
- RTO. At 20%, 120 parcels come back. Forward freight ₹60 + return freight ₹60 + packaging ₹25 + handling and repack ₹40 = ₹185 per parcel, so ₹22,200. Add the wasted acquisition cost, 120 × ₹250 = ₹30,000. Total ₹52,200 a month.
Annualised: MDR ₹67,968. COD fees ₹2,88,000. RTO ₹6,26,400. That's ₹9,82,368. Against a ₹2 lakh build, a ₹24,000 annual plan and ₹36,000 of apps.
Shipping itself sits on top and scales with volume: budget ₹32 to ₹45 per 500g for surface within the same zone, ₹75 to ₹110 for the far zones, more for air and heavier parcels. Ads dwarf all of it. The point of the exercise is not that the website is cheap. It's that the two lines nobody quotes you, COD handling and RTO, cost roughly five times what the site did in year one, and every year after that.
The app bill, and which ones are actually mandatory
Realistic monthly app spend for an Indian store: ₹2,500 to ₹6,000. What earns its place:
- GST-compliant invoicing. Non-negotiable if you're registered. Shopify's default order confirmation is not a tax invoice. Expect ₹400 to ₹900 a month.
- Shipping aggregator. Shiprocket or Delhivery's own panel. Usually free software with per-shipment pricing.
- Reviews and WhatsApp. WhatsApp is where Indian retention actually happens, and abandoned-cart plus COD-confirmation flows on WhatsApp pay for the app in the first week.
- Search and filters, once the catalogue passes about 150 SKUs. Shopify's native filtering runs out of road quickly on apparel and jewellery. We publish our own apps for a few of these gaps.
Skip, at least for now: page builders that lock your content into their sections, upsell apps stacked three deep, and anything that injects a script you can't audit. Every app adds JavaScript, and India's traffic is overwhelmingly mobile on patchy 4G. A theme carrying twelve app scripts will show a 4-second LCP on a mid-range Android in Nagpur, and that's a revenue problem before it's a technical one. Speed work is a real budget line, either a one-time optimisation project or an app that scans and monitors the score continuously, like our SwiftStore.
Shopify charges for a small business, and the cheapest honest way to start
If you're testing a product and have ₹15,000 total, here's the floor. Domain from any Indian registrar, ₹800 to ₹1,200 a year for a .in or .com. Shopify Basic on annual billing. Dawn, free. Razorpay, free to set up. Shiprocket, free to set up. Product photos on a phone against a white sheet near a window, which is genuinely fine for month one. One free review app. You build it yourself over two weekends.
Year one lands near ₹25,000 to ₹30,000 all in, excluding ads. That is the cheapest legitimate route, and it's the right route until you have proof that people want the product. Paying an agency ₹2.5 lakh to design a store for a product with no demand signal is the most common way Indian founders waste money. We turn that brief away more often than we take it.
Come back for a proper build when you're at 15 to 20 orders a day and the constraint has shifted from demand to conversion and operations.
Shopify vs WooCommerce: the cost comparison nobody runs properly
WooCommerce looks free and isn't. Managed hosting that survives a Diwali traffic spike is ₹1,500 to ₹6,000 a month. Then annual licences for the plugins you'll need: a payment gateway extension, a decent filter plugin, a booking or subscription plugin, a backup service, a security layer. Call it ₹25,000 to ₹60,000 a year in licences. Then somebody has to apply updates, and when a plugin update breaks checkout at 9pm on the second day of a sale, that somebody is a developer on retainer at ₹15,000 to ₹40,000 a month.
Total cost of ownership on WooCommerce usually lands above Shopify Basic once you count that maintenance honestly. Where Woo genuinely wins: you need full database control, unusual B2B pricing logic, or a content-heavy site where WordPress is the actual product. Where Shopify wins: you'd rather your team spent its hours on merchandising than on patching. Migrations run in both directions and we handle moves onto Shopify often enough to say the WooCommerce-to-Shopify direction is the busier one.
Shopify Plus pricing in India, and when it's premature
Plus is quoted in US dollars, starting around USD 2,300 a month on a multi-year term, with variable pricing above a revenue threshold. That's roughly ₹2 lakh a month before a single app or a line of code, so about ₹24 lakh a year.
It's worth it when you have a specific reason: checkout customisation through Shopify Functions, multiple storefronts across India and the GCC on one back end, real B2B wholesale, or launch-day traffic that needs the higher API limits. Wanting to "look like a serious brand" is not a reason. Below roughly ₹15 crore a year in revenue, we usually tell founders to stay on Advanced and spend the difference on RTO reduction and creative. When Plus does make sense, our Plus practice handles the migration and the Functions work.
The three lines to fix first
Push UPI above cards in your checkout ordering. Add a small prepaid incentive and a COD confirmation step. Pull your last 90 days of RTO by pincode and switch off the worst offenders. None of that is a design project and all of it moves the ₹9.8 lakh number.
If you want the same model built on your own order data instead of my example figures, send us read-only access and we'll run a free audit that puts a rupee figure on each line for your store.