WooCommerce vs Shopify in India: The Real 3-Year Cost, Worked Out in Rupees

“Shopify or WooCommerce?” is the question I hear most from people starting an online store in India. Most comparisons answer it with features. I think the better answer is in the costs, because one Indian detail changes the arithmetic: Shopify Payments isn’t available here. Every Shopify store in India uses a third-party gateway such as Razorpay, and Shopify charges its own transaction fee on top.

So I worked out what each platform would cost over three years, at three levels of sales.

The prices I used

These come from Shopify’s India pricing page and Razorpay’s standard rates as of October 2026. Prices change, so check them before you decide.

Razorpay’s standard plan charges 2% on domestic cards, UPI, netbanking and wallets (2.15% on corporate cards, up to 3% on international cards), plus 18% GST on its fee. Both platforms pay this, so it doesn’t decide anything. But it does mean a Shopify Basic store in India gives away about 4% of every sale in fees: 2% to Razorpay and 2% to Shopify.

WooCommerce itself is free, and so is Razorpay’s WooCommerce plugin, which is published in the WordPress plugin directory. You pay for hosting, any paid extensions, and the work of keeping it all updated.

Result 1: Shopify’s platform cost depends on your sales

Here’s Shopify’s own share over three years (subscription plus transaction fee, before GST), at three monthly sales levels:

The break-even points are easy to work out:

• Grow beats Basic above ₹4.1 lakh a month in sales. Grow costs ₹4,100 more a month and saves 1% of sales.
• Advanced beats Grow above ₹42.7 lakh a month. Below that, Advanced only makes sense for its features.

At ₹10 lakh a month, the transaction fee on Basic would come to ₹7.2 lakh over three years. That’s money for nothing more than using Razorpay instead of a payment system Shopify can’t offer here.

Result 2: the full three-year picture

Platform fees aren’t the whole story. A real store also needs building, apps and upkeep, so here are the other costs I included:

Put it all together, using Shopify’s cheapest plan at each level:

At small volumes the two cost about the same. Shopify’s predictability usually wins there, because there’s nothing to host and very little to maintain. As sales grow, Shopify’s cost grows with them while WooCommerce’s stays roughly flat. Using the middle of my ranges, WooCommerce becomes cheaper at about ₹80,000 a month in sales. Above about ₹3.1 lakh a month it’s cheaper even when every WooCommerce cost sits at the top of its range and every Shopify cost at the bottom, as long as someone looks after the store properly.

The “plus better hosting” in the last row is a real caveat. A WooCommerce store doing ₹10 lakh a month needs good hosting, caching and monitoring, and that can cost more than ₹3,000 a month. A slow or hacked store loses far more than it saves.

Costs that aren’t in the tables

1. Your time. Shopify updates, security and uptime are someone else’s problem. With WooCommerce they’re yours, or your developer’s. If something breaks during a festival sale, who answers the phone?
2. App creep. Shopify stores tend to gather paid apps: reviews, wishlists, upsells, subscriptions. ₹2,000 a month is a modest store, and it can easily run to several times that.
3. Moving away later. Leaving Shopify means rebuilding the theme and checkout customisations. WooCommerce data lives in your own database and is easier to take elsewhere.
4. GST on fees. Both Shopify’s charges and Razorpay’s fee carry GST. That doesn’t change which platform wins, but it makes both totals higher.

How I advise clients

Neither platform is cheaper for everyone. Shopify charges a share of your growth, and WooCommerce charges for your attention. In India, that 2% transaction fee makes the trade-off sharper than in countries where Shopify Payments is available. Work out your own numbers, and decide which of the two you’d rather spend.