At 100,000 monthly sessions, the honest answer to the WooCommerce vs Shopify cost question is that the two land within about ₹15,000 a month of each other — and which one is cheaper depends less on the platform than on how much of your revenue is prepaid and whether you already employ someone who can safely update a PHP plugin on a Friday. Shopify's cost rises with the money you collect through a gateway. WooCommerce's cost rises with complexity and stays flat as you grow. Everything else in this comparison is a footnote to those two sentences.
What follows is the actual ledger we build when a founder asks us to price this out, with the arithmetic shown so you can swap in your own numbers.
The store we're pricing
100,000 sessions a month, Indian D2C, apparel or personal care or home. Conversion at 1.8%, which is a normal number for a store with decent product pages and a working Meta account. So:
100,000 × 1.8% = 1,800 orders. At an average order value of ₹1,650, that's ₹29.7 lakh a month, roughly ₹3.6 crore a year.
Half those orders are cash on delivery. That single fact changes the Shopify maths more than anything else on this page, and almost every WooCommerce-vs-Shopify comparison written outside India ignores it.
Shopify's bill: the plan is the small part
Shopify Payments doesn't operate in India, so you're on Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree or similar. Shopify charges a third-party gateway fee on top of what the gateway itself takes: around 2% on Basic, 1% on the mid plan, 0.5% on Advanced. Plan prices in India at the time of writing sit near ₹1,994, ₹7,447 and ₹30,164 a month on annual billing. Check the current numbers before you commit; they move.
The fee applies to money that moves through the gateway. COD doesn't. So of ₹29.7 lakh GMV, only ₹14.85 lakh is exposed:
- Basic: ₹1,994 + 2% of ₹14.85L = ₹1,994 + ₹29,700 = ₹31,694
- Mid plan: ₹7,447 + 1% of ₹14.85L = ₹7,447 + ₹14,850 = ₹22,297
- Advanced: ₹30,164 + 0.5% of ₹14.85L = ₹30,164 + ₹7,425 = ₹37,589
The middle plan wins, and it isn't close. We still find stores at this volume sitting on Basic and paying ₹9,000 a month for the privilege, and stores on Advanced because someone assumed bigger is cheaper.
The crossover is easy to solve for. Advanced beats the mid plan when 30,164 + 0.005P = 7,447 + 0.01P, so P = ₹45.4 lakh of prepaid GMV per month. Below that, don't upgrade. With a 50% COD mix, ₹45 lakh prepaid means about ₹90 lakh total — a very different business from the one we're pricing.
Then apps. A store doing 1,800 orders a month typically runs reviews, a WhatsApp tool, a shipping aggregator, email and SMS, filters or search if the catalogue is past a few hundred SKUs, and maybe a returns app. That's ₹15,000 to ₹35,000 a month in real money. Call it ₹25,000, and be aware app creep is the single most reliable way for a Shopify bill to double in eighteen months without anyone deciding it should.
Shopify running total: about ₹47,000 a month. Plus a theme (₹0 to ₹40,000 once) and whatever development you buy, which is a project cost rather than a platform cost — we break that down separately in what Shopify development actually costs in India.
Why Shopify Plus doesn't pay for itself at this size
Plus lands somewhere near ₹1.9 lakh a month and drops the third-party gateway fee to about 0.2%. Against Advanced, you're saving 0.3% of prepaid GMV to spend an extra ₹1.7 lakh. Break-even on fees alone needs ₹1.7L ÷ 0.003 = ₹5.7 crore of prepaid GMV a month.
So nobody buys Plus for the fee saving. You buy it for checkout extensibility, B2B price lists, higher API limits, more staff accounts, Launchpad for sale events. Those are real, and at some point they're worth it. At ₹30 lakh a month they are not, and we say so to two or three founders a quarter who arrive convinced otherwise. If you're genuinely at the edge, our Plus practice page lists the triggers we look for.
The WooCommerce bill: hosting is the small part
Here's the thing about WooCommerce at 100k sessions: the cart and checkout can't be full-page cached. Sessions, cart contents and nonces are per-user, so every add-to-cart and every checkout step hits PHP and MySQL. Your ₹400-a-month shared host has been fine for the blog and will fall over the first time a creator posts about you at 9pm.
Realistic monthly costs:
- Managed cloud hosting, 8–16 GB, with Redis object cache and a staging environment: ₹12,000–₹25,000
- CDN and WAF (Cloudflare Pro or equivalent): ₹2,000
- Off-server backups: ₹700
- Plugin licences, annualised: WooCommerce extensions, a page builder, a caching plugin, ACF Pro, a security subscription, a product feed plugin, search. Realistically $800–$1,500 a year, so ₹6,000–₹11,000 a month
That's roughly ₹23,000 a month of infrastructure and licences, and no per-order cut to anyone but Razorpay. On paper WooCommerce is winning by a distance.
The line item nobody budgets: someone has to do the updates
WordPress core, WooCommerce, and fifteen to thirty plugins all ship updates on their own schedule. A few of those updates will break something. Not theoretically — routinely. The ones that hurt are checkout-adjacent: a payment plugin update that changes a hook, a caching rule that starts serving a logged-in cart to a stranger, a PHP 8.2 upgrade that kills a plugin the previous developer modified in place.
Doing this properly means pulling to staging, updating, smoke-testing checkout with a real card and a real COD order, then pushing. Twenty to forty minutes when nothing goes wrong, two hours when something does, twice a month. Add uptime monitoring, database cleanup as wp_postmeta bloats past a few million rows, and being reachable during a festive sale.
A competent retainer for that in India runs ₹25,000–₹60,000 a month. In-house, a mid-level WordPress developer at ₹9 LPA is about ₹75,000 a month fully loaded, and won't be spending all of it on you. Take the retainer at ₹35,000.
WooCommerce running total: about ₹58,000 a month.
Shopify isn't maintenance-free either. Theme updates, app scripts piling onto every page load, a checkout that changes under you when Shopify ships something. But the surface area is smaller and nothing you neglect takes the site down. Nobody has ever had a Shopify store defaced because they skipped a security patch. The one thing that does drift is speed — every app you install adds script weight, which is why we keep SwiftStore pointed at stores we've built, so a PageSpeed drop shows up as an alert rather than as a bad quarter.
Downtime, priced honestly
Agencies inflate this one, so let's do the arithmetic. ₹29.7 lakh a month over 730 hours is ₹4,068 an hour on average. Peak hours run maybe four times baseline, so ₹16,000. A three-hour outage at peak costs you around ₹49,000 of orders, and you'll recover a chunk of it — people come back.
Annoying. Not existential. The expensive failure isn't the outage, it's the silent one.
A plugin update that quietly breaks COD order confirmation on mobile Safari. Nothing looks wrong. The site is up, GA is recording sessions, ads are running. You notice on Monday because Saturday's order count was odd. Two days at a 40% checkout drop: ₹99,000 a day × 2 × 40% = ₹79,200, plus the ad spend you burned driving traffic into a broken funnel. We've been called in to diagnose exactly this more than once, and the discovery cost — finding which of twenty-eight plugins did it — is usually a full day.
You cannot fully price that risk. You can only note that WooCommerce has a long tail of failure modes Shopify structurally doesn't, and that the tail is where the money goes.
Side by side at 100k sessions
Shopify, mid plan, 50% COD, ₹29.7 lakh GMV: ₹22,297 platform and fees + ₹25,000 apps = ₹47,300 a month.
WooCommerce, same store: ₹23,000 hosting and licences + ₹35,000 retainer = ₹58,000 a month, with a wider variance and more of your own attention consumed.
Shopify is cheaper here by about ₹1.3 lakh a year. That's not a lot on ₹3.6 crore of revenue, which is why the decision shouldn't be made on the monthly bill at all. It should be made on where you want your engineering hours to go and how fast you need to ship merchandising changes.
Where the comparison flips
Run the same store at ₹1 crore of prepaid GMV a month — say ₹1.4 crore total with less COD, because prepaid share climbs as a brand matures.
Shopify Advanced: ₹30,164 + 0.5% of ₹1 crore = ₹80,164, plus ₹30,000 of apps = ₹1.1 lakh a month.
WooCommerce: hosting steps up to maybe ₹35,000, retainer to ₹45,000. ₹80,000 a month.
Now WooCommerce is ₹30,000 a month cheaper, and the gap widens every month you grow, because Shopify takes a cut of revenue and WooCommerce takes a cut of complexity. At ₹3 crore prepaid the difference is well over ₹1 lakh a month. That is the point at which self-hosting is a defensible financial decision — provided you have a developer on the hook, a staging workflow that people actually use, and the discipline to keep the plugin count under twenty.
Most brands never get there and would be better off ignoring the whole question. Some do, and a few of them should genuinely stay on WooCommerce. We'll tell you that if it's true; we'd rather not run a migration that makes your unit economics worse.
The costs that don't show up on either invoice
Speed of change. On Shopify, a merchandiser can restructure a collection, launch a discount and swap hero creative before lunch. On a bespoke WooCommerce build, some of that needs a developer, and a developer means a ticket, and a ticket means Thursday. Over a festive quarter that lag costs more than any hosting bill.
Hiring. WordPress developers are everywhere and cheap. Good Liquid and Shopify-API developers cost more and are harder to find, though not impossibly so — that's most of what we do at our Bengaluru office.
Peak traffic. A Shopify checkout on 3rd October at 8pm behaves the way it did on a Tuesday morning. A WooCommerce checkout at 500 concurrent users behaves the way your PHP worker count and your database indexes let it. Load testing before every big sale is a real, recurring line item that nobody puts in the spreadsheet.
Things Shopify simply won't do without work: complex B2B pricing tiers, deep WordPress-native content operations, unusual tax handling, invoice formats some Indian accountants insist on. Each one is solvable, some through an app, some through a private app. Solvable is not free.
What to do with this
Pull three numbers from your own dashboard: last month's GMV, your prepaid-versus-COD split, and your current monthly spend on hosting plus plugins plus apps plus whoever maintains the site. Put them into the arithmetic above. If your prepaid GMV is under about ₹45 lakh a month and you're on Shopify Advanced, you're probably overpaying by ₹5,000–₹8,000 a month for nothing, and that's a ten-minute fix.
If you're weighing a move in either direction and want a second read on the numbers, send us the store and the current bill through a free audit. We'll tell you if the platform is the actual problem. Often it isn't.