How Much Does an E-commerce Website Cost in India? A 2026 Breakdown

A typical situation I see: a clothing brand from Bhiwandi or a spice seller in Vashi collects three quotes for an online store. One is from a freelancer, one from a mid-sized agency, one from a company that builds custom platforms. The highest is more than ten times the lowest, and all three are described as “a complete e-commerce website”. The owner asks me which one is right.

Usually none of the quotes are wrong; they are quoting for different things. And none of them mention the bills that arrive every month after launch: platform fees, payment gateway charges, apps and plugins. This article explains how to work out what an online store will really cost you in India, using published fees where they exist, and how to read a build quote so you can compare like with like.

1. Separate the build cost from the running cost

Every online store has two kinds of cost. The build cost is what you pay once to get the store designed, set up, filled with products and launched. The running cost is what you pay every month to keep it live and take payments: the platform or hosting, the payment gateway, apps or plugins, and maintenance.

Owners tend to fixate on the build quote because it is one big number. But a store that is cheap to build and expensive to run can cost more over three years than the reverse. A store selling ₹5 lakh a month pays its payment gateway more in a single year than many small builds cost in total. So I always ask clients to estimate both, and to compare quotes on a three-year total.

You will notice I do not give a table of “e-commerce website cost in India” build prices. I could not find any survey of Indian build prices with a published method, and the tables online vary so widely that they are more marketing than data. What I can give you are the published running costs and a way to judge build scope yourself.

2. Shopify: what the plans cost in rupees

Shopify is a hosted platform: you pay a monthly fee, and Shopify handles hosting, security and updates. Its India pricing page lists these plans as of October 2026.

Source: Shopify India pricing, checked 30 October 2026. The page does not say whether GST is included. Trial offer at the time: 3 days free, then ₹20 a month for 3 months.

That last column is the one most owners miss. If you take payments through a third-party gateway such as Razorpay, Shopify adds its own percentage on each sale, on top of the gateway’s fee. On the Basic plan that is 2% of every order.

Themes and apps

Shopify’s theme store lists free themes alongside paid ones; the paid themes I checked ranged from $170 to $420 as a one-time purchase. Most stores also add apps for reviews, WhatsApp, shipping, GST invoices or upsells. Shopify’s billing help explains that app subscriptions are added to your Shopify bill, while some third-party apps charge you separately outside it. Five apps at a few dollars each soon become a real monthly line.

3. WooCommerce: free software, paid everything else

WooCommerce runs on WordPress. WooCommerce’s own pricing page describes the core platform as free, with no monthly subscription, and says it adds no charge on payments beyond your processor’s fees. That is a real advantage over Shopify’s per-sale fee on third-party gateways.

The same page is honest about the other costs. It estimates hosting at $25 to $350 a month for most stores, scaling with traffic, and extensions at $29 to $299 a year each. These are WooCommerce’s global figures in US dollars; Indian hosting can cost less at the small end, but a busy store on cheap shared hosting is a common reason for slow checkouts.

Source: WooCommerce pricing, checked 30 October 2026. Global figures in USD, not India-specific. Notes column is my opinion.

The hidden cost of WooCommerce is responsibility. With Shopify, a security patch is Shopify’s problem. With WooCommerce, someone has to update WordPress and every plugin, test that checkout still works, and keep backups. If that someone is a developer on a monthly retainer, include it in your running cost.

See also: for a deeper comparison of the two platforms, read Shopify vs WooCommerce for Indian businesses.

4. Payment gateway fees: the bill that grows with you

Whatever platform you choose, you pay a gateway to collect money. Razorpay is one of the most common choices for Indian stores, so I use its published standard plan as the example. According to Razorpay’s pricing page, the standard plan charges a 2% platform fee per successful domestic transaction, covering cards, UPI, netbanking and wallets, and up to 3% on international cards. Setup and annual maintenance fees are zero, and 18% GST applies to Razorpay’s fee (not to the order value).

A common surprise concerns UPI. Razorpay notes that UPI is free of MDR (merchant discount rate) under RBI policy, but its 2% still applies as a platform fee. So “UPI is free” is true for the bank charge and not true for your gateway bill on a standard plan. Larger merchants can often negotiate lower rates; ask once your volumes justify it.

A worked comparison: what you pay each month

Here is how platform and payment fees add up for a Shopify store using Razorpay at two sales levels. These are calculated from the published fees above, not quotes, and they leave out apps, GST on Shopify’s fees and shipping.

Calculated from Shopify India pricing (monthly billing) and Razorpay standard pricing (2% + 18% GST on the fee), October 2026. Illustration only; excludes apps, GST on Shopify fees, shipping and any negotiated rates.

Two lessons come out of the arithmetic. First, payment costs dwarf the plan fee once you have real sales; at ₹10 lakh a month, Razorpay’s share alone is ₹23,600. Second, the cheapest plan stops being cheapest. Basic and Grow cost the same at about ₹5.45 lakh of monthly sales. Above that, Grow’s lower per-sale fee saves money. Advanced does not overtake Grow on fees alone until roughly ₹57 lakh a month, so choose it for its features, not to save on fees.

For a WooCommerce store with the same Razorpay plan, the payment line is identical, with no platform percentage on top; your other costs are hosting, extensions and maintenance instead.

5. What actually drives the build cost

Build quotes differ because scope differs. When two vendors quote for “a complete store”, one may mean a theme set up with 50 products, the other a custom design with 2,000 products, an ERP link and a redesigned checkout. The table below lists the scope items that move a quote most and the question to ask each vendor. Use it to make quotes comparable.

Framework based on my experience of scoping store builds. Not market data.

My opinion: most small Indian stores do not need a custom platform to start. A well-configured Shopify or WooCommerce store with a customised theme covers the needs of the large majority of new online businesses. A custom store earns its cost when you have unusual flows that a template cannot handle, such as complex B2B pricing, product configurators or a marketplace.

6. The costs owners forget

Even with a clear build quote and fee estimate, a few costs tend to appear only after launch:

• Product content. Good photos and honest descriptions for every product, in-house or outsourced. Budget time if not money.
• Shipping and returns. Courier charges, packaging and reverse pickups. Baymard’s research (below) shows returns policy and delivery speed affect whether people buy.
• Apps and extensions. Monthly subscriptions that grow as you add features.
• Policy pages. Clear shipping, returns, refund, privacy and terms pages. Have a lawyer review them; India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, notified in November 2025, phase in obligations on handling customer data over 18 months, according to PTI’s report.
• Maintenance. Updates, backups, fixing broken integrations, adding seasonal banners.
• Marketing. A store with no traffic sells nothing. Google’s free product listings via Merchant Center can show products across Search, the Shopping tab, Images, Lens, Maps and YouTube without paying for ads, but nothing is guaranteed to show, and most stores also need ads, SEO or social.

7. Speed and checkout: where cheap builds cost the most

The real cost of a poorly built store is not on any invoice; it shows up as sales that never happen. Baymard Institute’s cart abandonment research, which averages 50 studies, puts the documented average cart abandonment rate at 70.22%. Some of that is people browsing, but Baymard’s survey of US shoppers shows how much is caused by the store itself.

Source: Baymard Institute, cart abandonment rate statistics. Survey of US online shoppers; average abandonment rate from 50 studies, 2006 to 2025. Global/US data, not India-specific.

Several of those reasons are build decisions: forced account creation, a long checkout, errors, hidden costs. A good build shows shipping costs early, allows guest checkout, and is tested on real phones on real mobile networks.

Speed matters too. A Google-commissioned study by 55 and Deloitte, Milliseconds Make Millions, found that a 0.1-second improvement in mobile load time was associated with an 8.4% increase in conversion rates on retail sites (37 European and US brand sites, 2019). Google’s Core Web Vitals give the targets to build to: main content within 2.5 seconds, response to a tap in under 200 milliseconds, and a stable layout. Indian shoppers are overwhelmingly on mobile data; TRAI counts 1,066.43 million of the country’s 1,114.17 million internet subscriptions as wireless, as of June 2026, in its quarterly report.

See also: for checkout fixes you can make after launch, see How to reduce cart abandonment.

8. How to compare quotes fairly

Once you have a written brief, compare quotes on what they include, not the headline number. A quote I would trust includes:

1. The platform and plan recommended, with the reason, and estimated monthly running costs at your sales level.
2. Which pages are custom-designed and which use a theme.
3. How many products are included in setup, and who supplies data and photos.
4. Every integration by name (gateway, courier, accounting, WhatsApp, ERP).
5. Speed targets and how they will be measured.
6. SEO basics included at launch: page titles, product structured data, a sitemap, clean URLs and redirects if you are moving from an old store.
7. Who owns the store account, domain, theme and code at the end.
8. What support covers after launch, for how long, and what it costs after that.

Ownership deserves its own line. Insist that the Shopify account, domain and hosting are registered in your business’s name, with you as the owner and the developer as a collaborator. I have seen too many owners unable to change their own store because a former vendor holds the login.

Where this advice breaks down

• Fees change. Shopify, WooCommerce and Razorpay all revise pricing. Every figure here was checked on 30 October 2026; recheck before you decide.
• Gateway rates are negotiable. Razorpay’s 2% is a standard published rate. Businesses with higher volumes can often negotiate, and other gateways price differently, so my worked example is a starting point, not your actual bill.
• Much of the conversion data is global. The Baymard and Deloitte figures come from US and European shoppers. Indian shoppers have their own habits, such as heavy use of cash on delivery and UPI, so treat the numbers as direction, not prediction.
• Selling on marketplaces is a different calculation. If most of your sales will come from Amazon or Flipkart, their commission and fee structures matter more than your own store’s costs.
• Some businesses do not need a store yet. If you sell a handful of products to repeat customers, a catalogue on WhatsApp with UPI payments may be enough until volumes justify a proper store.

Checklist before you sign a quote

Go back to the owner with three quotes, one ten times the size of another. Once each vendor answers the same brief and shows the same running-cost line, the gap usually shrinks, and the right choice becomes obvious.