Shopify vs WooCommerce in India: The 2% Nobody Mentions

Shopify pricing in India 2026: all four plans, with GST

Shopify Basic costs ₹1,769 a month in India once 18% GST is added to the ₹1,499 annual-billed price, and ₹2,353 a month if you pay monthly. Annual billing saves about 25% on every tier, but you pay twelve months upfront to get it. Here is the full lineup as it appears on Shopify's India pricing page, checked 7 September 2026.

Two corrections worth making, because a lot of Indian comparisons still get them wrong. The middle plan is called Grow, not “Shopify” — that rename happened and most articles never caught up. And Grow and Advanced do have annual billing at a genuine discount; pages that show a dash in that column are simply out of date. Plus exists too, from ₹1,75,000 a month, and it is the only tier with a 0.2% third-party fee.

Shopify currently runs a 3-day free trial followed by ₹20/month for three months. That offer is genuinely useful for validating a product, but it distorts every “I started a store for ₹20” post you will read — month four is ₹1,769 whether or not you have made a sale. There is no Starter tier on the India pricing page as of September 2026, whatever third-party listicles claim.

[AFFILIATE_LINK: SHOPIFY]

How much is Shopify's transaction fee in India? 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced

The ladder is 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. Add 18% GST and the numbers you actually pay are 2.36%, 1.18%, 0.708% and 0.236%. This fee applies to every Indian merchant and almost nobody else: it is charged when you use a third-party payment provider, and because Shopify Payments does not operate in India, there is no version of an Indian Shopify store that escapes it. A seller in the UK on Shopify Payments pays 0% here.

Put a real number on it. A store turning over ₹5,00,000 a month pays ₹11,800 in Shopify surcharge on Basic, ₹5,900 on Grow and ₹3,540 on Advanced — before the subscription, and before the payment gateway takes its own cut. That is the single largest line item most Indian Shopify sellers never budget for, because it does not appear on the pricing page next to the plan price.

The crossover follows directly. Grow costs ₹4,838 a month more than Basic on annual billing with GST (₹6,607 − ₹1,769), and saves 1.18% of revenue. Divide: ₹4,838 ÷ 0.0118 ≈ ₹4.1 lakh a month. Above that, Grow is cheaper than Basic despite costing nearly four times as much. Advanced costs ₹20,155 more than Grow and saves a further 0.472%, so ₹20,155 ÷ 0.00472 ≈ ₹42.7 lakh a month. Redo both sums with your own revenue rather than trusting a rule of thumb.

Which Shopify plan should an Indian store actually pick?

Stay on Basic below roughly ₹4 lakh of monthly revenue, move to Grow above it, and only look at Advanced past roughly ₹42 lakh. That is a rupee threshold rather than a personality type, and it is the only version of this advice that survives contact with a spreadsheet.

There is a second reason to upgrade that has nothing to do with fees. Grow adds extra staff accounts and lower-friction shipping rates, which matters the moment more than one person is packing orders. Advanced adds custom report building and third-party calculated shipping rates, which matters if a courier aggregator needs to quote live rates at checkout. If either of those is blocking you operationally, upgrade before the maths says to.

The full fee stack on one ₹1,500 Indian order

On a ₹1,500 order, a Shopify Basic store in India loses about ₹71 to fees. The same order on WooCommerce loses about ₹35. Here is where each rupee goes.

Razorpay's published standard rate card is a flat 2% platform fee across cards, netbanking, wallets and UPI, plus 18% GST, with no setup fee and no annual maintenance charge. That last detail catches people out: UPI carries zero MDR under RBI policy, so the banks take nothing — but Razorpay still levies its 2% as a technology fee. “UPI is free” is true at the network level and false on your settlement statement. Cashfree and PayU publish their own rate cards and negotiate volume tiers, so shop around, but assume a similar order of magnitude rather than a structural escape.

The point that matters: the gateway fee is identical on both platforms. Nothing about WooCommerce gets you cheaper payment processing. The only structural difference is Shopify's own surcharge layered on top, so WooCommerce's fee advantage is exactly your Shopify plan's percentage and not one paisa more. On Grow the Shopify column falls to ₹53.10; on Advanced to ₹46.02. Anyone selling you a bigger number than that is counting something twice.

Cost side by side

Shopify's paid themes run $100 to $420 as a one-off purchase in its own theme store, which is roughly ₹9,000 to ₹37,000 depending on the exchange rate — noticeably more than most comparisons claim. Free themes exist on both platforms and are perfectly adequate to launch with.

What WooCommerce really costs in India, line by line

A working WooCommerce store in India starts at about ₹176 a month all-in — ₹149 hosting plus 18% GST — and the plugin itself is genuinely free. WooCommerce.com offers the core download at no cost and has no subscription tier you are obliged to buy. What you are actually paying for is a server, a domain and your own attention.

Now the part most comparisons skip, because it makes their favourite platform look worse: the renewal cliff. Those promotional rates hold for the 48-month term you prepay, which means Premium costs ₹8,439 upfront with GST and works out to ₹176 a month across years one to four. In year five it renews at ₹449 plus GST — ₹530 a month, roughly triple. That is not a trick unique to Hostinger; every budget host prices this way. It is simply a number you should see before you commit. I have written up the full renewal price picture separately because it deserves more than a footnote.

Even so, the comparison is not close. Year one on WooCommerce with Premium hosting and a .in domain is roughly ₹2,227 GST-inclusive. Year five, after hosting has tripled and the domain renews, is roughly ₹7,760. Shopify Basic is ₹21,228 a year GST-inclusive in both years — and that is the subscription only, before a single rupee of transaction fee. If price is your deciding factor, this section has already decided it.

Does WooCommerce need special hosting? What a store actually requires

Shared hosting is genuinely fine for a WooCommerce store with a modest catalogue and a few hundred daily visitors. You need a VPS when traffic is sustained rather than spiky, or when sale-day spikes start timing out checkout. That is the honest threshold, and it is a lot higher than hosting companies would like you to believe.

Here is the mechanism no generic comparison bothers to explain. A blog is almost entirely cacheable — one rendered page served to everyone. A store is not. Cart, checkout and my-account must be excluded from page cache, because serving a cached cart to the wrong shopper is a catastrophe. So every logged-in shopper, every add-to-cart, every checkout step hits PHP and MySQL directly. That is why a store is far heavier than a blog with identical traffic, and why RAM and vCPU matter more than disk space when you are choosing a plan.

It also means configuration buys you more headroom than money often does. Redis object caching, correct cache-exclusion rules for the four dynamic WooCommerce pages, a real system cron replacing WP-Cron, and PHP 8.3 will frequently do more for checkout latency than jumping a tier. Do those first, then upgrade if the numbers still say so.

One thing to watch: ₹599 buys either Cloud Startup or KVM 1, and they are completely different products. Cloud Startup is managed shared-style hosting with dedicated resources and no server administration. KVM 1 is a virtual private server with root access, which means you own the updates, the firewall and the backups. Pick Cloud Startup unless you specifically want root. The KVM VPS plan breakdown and the cloud hosting guide go into each properly. All the VPS tiers run AMD EPYC in HPE and Dell servers with NVMe storage, 1 Gbps networking and the same 30-day money-back window.

Speed and Core Web Vitals: Shopify wins by default, WooCommerce wins if you tune it

Shopify is faster out of the box. That is not a controversial claim and I am not going to pretend otherwise — Shopify owns the CDN, the server stack, the image pipeline and the theme framework, and there is very little a non-technical seller can do to break any of it. Public field-data comparisons of Core Web Vitals pass rates have consistently put hosted commerce platforms ahead of self-hosted WordPress on mobile. But that gap is a hosting-and-configuration gap, not a ceiling.

What is genuinely useful is knowing how each side fails, because the failure modes are completely different. Shopify stores degrade from app bloat — every review widget, upsell app, popup and analytics pixel injects JavaScript you cannot remove without editing the theme, and the sellers who install fifteen apps end up slower than a well-run WooCommerce site. WooCommerce stores degrade from cheap oversold shared hosting, no object cache, unoptimised hero images and plugin sprawl.

What actually closes the gap on WooCommerce is a short and boring list: NVMe storage, PHP 8.3, Redis object caching, an image CDN, LiteSpeed or an equivalent server-level cache, and a lean theme instead of a multipurpose one with a page builder bundled in. A ₹249 plan with all of that in place will beat a ₹2,000 plan with none of it. Speed on WooCommerce is a configuration problem far more often than a budget problem.

COD and RTO: the cost that appears on neither pricing page

Cash on delivery is the majority payment method for Indian ecommerce, and return-to-origin on COD orders is, for a lot of small stores, a bigger line item than the platform subscription. Neither Shopify nor WooCommerce puts it on a pricing page, because it is not their cost — it is entirely yours.

The mechanism is what makes it expensive. A prepaid order that is refused costs you a refund and a reverse shipment. A COD order that is refused costs you forward freight, reverse freight, packaging and handling with zero revenue attached — nothing was ever collected. Courier aggregators also charge a COD handling fee per delivered order on top of freight. So the true cost of an RTO is roughly two shipping legs plus packaging, and it lands on your margin rather than on your gross merchandise value.

Work it with your own numbers rather than mine: take your monthly orders, multiply by your COD share, multiply by your RTO rate, then multiply by (forward freight + reverse freight + packaging). For most stores doing a hundred orders a month that arithmetic produces a figure several times larger than a ₹176 hosting bill, which is exactly why arguing about ₹176 versus ₹1,769 while ignoring RTO is the wrong order of priorities.

On the platform question specifically: Shopify has the deeper native ecosystem for RTO suppression, and the specialist Indian checkout layers that predict and block risky COD orders built for Shopify first. WooCommerce is not shut out — Razorpay ships an official WooCommerce integration including its checkout product, COD is a built-in core payment method, and free plugins restrict COD by pincode, cart value, product or shipping zone. Indian courier aggregators publish WooCommerce plugins covering multiple carriers. The honest verdict: Shopify gives you this out of the box, WooCommerce matches most of it with free plugins and a weekend of setup.

GST: what you pay on the platform vs what your store must issue

Yes, 18% GST is added to your Shopify subscription and to Shopify's transaction fee — and separately, your store must issue GST-compliant invoices to buyers. These are two entirely different obligations, and most comparisons conflate them into one vague sentence.

Side one, what you pay. 18% on the Shopify subscription, 18% on Shopify's order surcharge, 18% on your payment gateway's platform fee, and 18% on your hosting bill too. That is why every rupee figure in this article is stated GST-inclusive. Quoting ₹1,499 as the price of Shopify Basic in India is quoting a number nobody is ever invoiced.

Side two, what you issue. The invoice you owe your customer needs your GSTIN, HSN or SAC codes against each line, and the correct tax split — CGST plus SGST for an intra-state sale, IGST for inter-state — across the applicable slab. Cross the turnover threshold and e-invoicing applies as well. Neither platform does this natively: Shopify does not calculate Indian GST for you, so you configure tax rates manually and most sellers end up installing a paid GST invoicing app. WooCommerce has both free and paid plugins for the same job.

Note what that means for the comparison. A GST invoicing app is a recurring monthly cost on Shopify that belongs in the monthly total and is almost always left out of published comparisons. On WooCommerce it can be a free plugin. It is not a huge amount of money either way, but it is one more small thing that moves in the same direction as everything else on this page.

SEO: what each platform lets you change, and what it locks

WooCommerce gives you more technical control; Shopify gives you fewer ways to break things. For most Indian stores that difference is worth less than one genuinely good buying-guide page, so do not let anyone sell you a platform migration on SEO grounds alone.

Being specific about what Shopify actually locks: URL segments are fixed. Products live under /products/, categories under /collections/, static pages under /pages/ and the blog under /blogs/. That creates duplicate collection paths and constrains how you architect a content hub around your catalogue. What Shopify no longer locks is robots.txt — it exposes robots.txt.liquid, so the old “you cannot edit robots.txt on Shopify” claim you will still read on plenty of pages is out of date.

WooCommerce gives you full URL control, Yoast or Rank Math, and — the one that actually matters at scale — noindex control over faceted filter URLs. A store with many product attributes can generate thousands of near-duplicate filtered URLs, and being able to shut that down is a real technical advantage. Because it sits inside WordPress, you also get unlimited programmatic content without a separate blogging system. Decision rule: if organic content is your primary growth channel, that is the strongest single argument for WooCommerce anywhere on this page. If you grow through paid ads and marketplaces, this section should not move your decision at all.

The 30-orders-a-day test: at what point does WooCommerce actually win?

Revenue bands are a useless way to think about this because nobody knows their monthly revenue band off the top of their head — but everybody knows roughly how many orders a day they ship. So: at 30 orders a day and ₹1,500 average order value, about ₹13.5 lakh a month, Shopify Basic costs roughly ₹33,600 a month in platform fees against roughly ₹707 for WooCommerce on Cloud Startup. That is around ₹4 lakh a year.

All figures are GST-inclusive and assume ₹1,500 average order value, annual Shopify billing and the third-party payment surcharge for each tier. The payment gateway's own 2% is excluded because it is identical on both sides and would cancel out.

Now the counterweight, because a table like that is not an argument on its own. At three orders a day the gap is about ₹4,800 a month and you are running a business that has not proven itself yet — Shopify is very probably the right call, because your scarce resource is attention, not cash. The crossover is not really about percentages. It is about the point where the annual fee difference exceeds what a developer, or your own weekends, actually cost. For most people that arrives somewhere between ten and thirty orders a day. Below it, pay Shopify and get on with selling. Above it, the maths stops being close and starts being embarrassing.

Migrating from Shopify to WooCommerce (and back again)

A small catalogue moves in a weekend. A real D2C brand with apps, reviews and subscriptions takes four to eight weeks. The difference is almost never the products — it is everything bolted around them.

What ports cleanly: products, variants, customers and order history, via CSV export plus a free Shopify importer plugin, or a paid migration service priced by catalogue size. What does not port at all: the theme, every app and the data inside it, discount codes, subscription contracts, and product reviews unless you export them separately from whichever review app is holding them. Budget for rebuilding, not porting.

1. Export everything from Shopify. Export products with variants, customers and order history as CSV from the Shopify admin. Export product reviews separately from whichever review app holds them, because they live outside Shopify's own export.
2. Set up WordPress hosting and install WooCommerce. Provision hosting sized for a store rather than a blog, install WordPress and add the free WooCommerce plugin, then configure your currency, tax rates and shipping zones for India before importing anything.
3. Import the catalogue. Use a free Shopify importer plugin, WooCommerce's built-in CSV importer, or a paid migration service to bring products, variants, customers and orders across. Import into a staging site first, not the live domain.
4. Rebuild the theme and replace every app. The Shopify theme cannot be ported. Rebuild it on a lean WordPress theme and find a WordPress equivalent for each Shopify app you rely on, including GST invoicing, reviews and any subscription logic.
5. Build the 301 redirect map before launch. Shopify's /products/slug and /collections/slug become WooCommerce's /product/slug and /product-category/slug. Map every ranking URL to its new destination and load the redirects before you switch DNS, or you lose the rankings you already have.
6. Cut over and keep Shopify running for two weeks. Point DNS at the new store, place real test orders through your live gateway, and keep the Shopify subscription active for a fortnight so you can reconcile orders and re-export anything you missed.

The step most guides bury is step five, and it is the one that ruins migrations. Skip the 301 redirect map and you drop every ranking URL you own on cutover day. The reverse direction is a real query too — Shopify publishes an official WooCommerce importer, and the same redirect problem applies in mirror image. Either way, if you are moving hosts rather than platforms, the WordPress migration walkthrough covers the DNS and staging mechanics in more detail.

Shopify alternatives Indian sellers actually consider

If your objection to Shopify is the 2% and your objection to WooCommerce is the maintenance, there are India-first platforms sitting between them. Dukaan is built around fast mobile store setup and WhatsApp-led selling, which suits local sellers and anyone whose orders already arrive as WhatsApp messages. Instamojo grew out of payment links and is strongest for digital products, courses and services rather than physical inventory. Bikayi is India-first with COD and UPI treated as primary rather than bolted on.

Two feature gaps push sellers off Shopify specifically: no native WhatsApp ordering and no native PhonePe, both of which are default expectations for a large share of Indian buyers. Wix and Squarespace are worth a line each as design-led global builders, but India-specific functionality on both arrives through add-ons rather than natively.

The honest close: none of these has Shopify's app ecosystem or WooCommerce's content ceiling, and a store built on any of them is harder to migrate away from later because the export paths are less well trodden. If you want the fourth path entirely — owning the frontend and treating commerce as an API — the custom React ecommerce build is a different trade again: maximum control, maximum ongoing responsibility.

Which should you choose?

FAQ — Shopify vs WooCommerce in India

Related reading

• Shopify review for Indian sellers — the platform in detail.
• Hostinger plans and pricing in India — every tier with renewal rates.
• Cloud hosting for stores — when shared hosting stops coping.
• KVM VPS plans compared — the step up from shared for a busy store.
• Best web hosting in India — the wider field, not just one brand.
• Hosting under ₹200 a month — where the ₹176 figure sits.
• Domain prices in India — first year versus renewal.
• Migrating WordPress to a new host — the DNS and staging mechanics.
• Hosting cost calculator — run your own four-year total.
• Building an ecommerce site with React — the custom-build route.

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