WooCommerce Is Free. That Is the Most Expensive Thing About It.

With us, between INR 85,000 and INR 7,00,000 to build, depending on how much custom work is involved and whether you are migrating, and the three tiers above set out what sits in each band. Across the market you will see WooCommerce work offered from about INR 20,000 upward. At that end you are generally getting a free theme installed with a handful of free plugins, which is a legitimate product for a very simple shop. The more useful question is the annual one. A real store usually runs hosting plus four or five paid extensions, which together tend to land somewhere between roughly INR 25,000 and INR 1,20,000 a year before anybody maintains it. Ask for that number from everyone you talk to, including us.

Neither is better in general, and anybody who answers this without asking about your situation is guessing. Three things decide it. First, who maintains the store: Shopify handles its own updates, hosting and security, while WooCommerce makes all three your responsibility, so if nobody on your side will own that, Shopify is the safer answer regardless of anything else. Second, how unusual your requirements are: customer-specific pricing, bookings, complicated shipping rules or deep integration with systems you already run all favour WooCommerce, because it will bend where a hosted platform will not. Third, the arithmetic at your volume: Shopify charges a monthly fee and, unless you use its own payment product, a per-transaction fee, while WooCommerce charges nothing but costs real money in hosting, extension renewals and maintenance. At low volume Shopify is usually cheaper in total. At high volume, WooCommerce often is. For a straightforward Indian B2C brand with nobody technical in house, we usually lean Shopify. For a business with unusual rules, an existing WordPress site or serious volume, we usually lean WooCommerce. We build both and we will tell you which way we think you should go.

Comfortably, and 1,000 is a middling catalogue rather than a large one. The thing to understand is that product count is rarely what strains a WooCommerce store. Three other things are. Variations, because a hundred products in five sizes and four colours is two thousand variations, each one a separate record, and that is the number that actually matters. Order volume, which used to be the real weakness because orders were stored in the same general-purpose tables as everything else, and which High-Performance Order Storage fixed by moving them into four dedicated tables from WooCommerce 8.2 onward. And filtering, because letting customers filter a large catalogue by attribute generates expensive database queries unless it is built for that. Give it proper hosting, object caching, a current PHP version and HPOS, and tens of thousands of products is routine. Put it on a cheap shared plan built for a blog and it will struggle at a fraction of that.

Yes, and it is a defined piece of work rather than something that happens alongside the build. Products, variations, customers and order history all have to move, and so do the URLs, which is the part most often fumbled. Every old product and category address needs mapping to its new equivalent, because redirecting the lot to the homepage throws away whatever those pages had earned in search. We map them before launch and check them after. Expect a migration to add roughly two to four weeks depending on catalogue size and how clean the existing data is. One migration-specific detail worth knowing: HPOS is not switched on automatically for stores that already exist, so part of the work is confirming your migrated store is actually using it.

Fewer than you will be sold. The honest list for most stores is a shipping method that matches how you actually ship, a payment gateway integration, and something for whatever single thing makes your business unusual. Everything else is worth resisting until you can point at the problem it solves. We decide the stack before the build starts, price every renewal, and keep it short, because each extension is both a yearly bill and something that can break on update. We also have no affiliate arrangements with any extension vendor, so there is nothing in it for us either way.

More than a blog and less than people fear. The baseline worth insisting on is PHP 8.0 or newer, since the plugin directory lists 7.4 as the minimum and 8.0 as recommended, enough memory to run the admin comfortably, object caching available, and a staging environment you can test updates on. The most common problem we see in India is a shop running on a plan bought for a brochure site: fine with four orders a day, visibly struggling on the day a campaign works. Hosting is the cheapest part of the stack to get right and one of the most expensive to get wrong.

Somebody has to, and deciding who before launch is the single best thing you can do for the store. WooCommerce, WordPress, the theme and every extension update on their own schedules, and a store that is not being patched is a liability rather than just an out-of-date site. Some clients have a technical person and we hand over a documented routine. Others would rather we did it, which is covered on our website maintenance page. What does not work is assuming it will get done by whoever notices first.

Yes, and a lot of our WooCommerce work is exactly that. We start by looking at what is actually there, because inherited stores usually have custom code written into theme files, extensions nobody can account for, and sometimes HPOS still switched off. That look is worth paying for on its own before anybody proposes changes, and it is covered by our website audit. Sometimes the answer is a tidy-up and sometimes it is a rebuild, and we would rather tell you which after looking than guess beforehand.

Yes, and it is one of the better reasons to choose WooCommerce. Price lists by customer or group, minimum order quantities, quote requests, hidden prices until login, credit terms and approval steps are all buildable here. Some of it comes from extensions and some needs custom work, and it belongs in the Custom Build or Scale tier rather than a basic setup. Tell us early if this is what you need, because it changes both the recommendation and the price.

It will, because that is what we build and test for. Most Indian ecommerce traffic is mobile, a good deal of it on mid-range Android phones, and a store that feels fine on a designer laptop can be close to unusable there. We test on real devices and throttled connections. WooCommerce is not inherently slow, but it is easy to make slow by stacking extensions and under-specifying hosting, which is why both of those get decided at the start rather than discovered later.

Yes. We handle WooCommerce development Delhi NCR businesses can reach us for in person, and we work with clients across the rest of India and overseas in the UAE, the UK and the USA. Clients looking for a WooCommerce developer in Delhi are welcome at the studio in Vikaspuri, West Delhi, and everyone else is served perfectly well remotely, which is how most of our builds run. The parts that benefit from being in the same room, mainly requirements and the admin walkthrough, work fine over video when the right people attend.

The extension keeps working, but you stop receiving updates and support, which over a year or two turns into a real security and compatibility problem. This is worth understanding before you build a store on ten paid extensions. It is a recurring commitment rather than a one-off purchase, and it is a reasonable argument for keeping the stack short and preferring well-maintained free plugins where they genuinely do the job.

Yes, through extensions, and it works well enough that plenty of Indian brands sell overseas on it. The things that need real thought are not the currency switcher but the tax treatment, the shipping rates and the returns process for international orders. Those are business decisions with build consequences, so we settle them early rather than adding them after launch.

The platform is not the deciding factor, and anybody telling you WooCommerce is good or bad for SEO is overstating it. What matters is the category and product page structure, how filtering is handled, site speed and whether the content is worth ranking. Those are real and separate work, covered on our ecommerce SEO page. What we do in the build is avoid creating problems: clean URLs, sensible structure, proper redirects on a migration and a site that is quick enough not to be penalised for it.

It is as secure as it is maintained, which is a less comforting answer than yes but a more useful one. The core plugin is actively developed and the current release at the time of writing is 11.2.1. Most real incidents come from out-of-date extensions, weak hosting or abandoned plugins rather than from WooCommerce itself. That is why we keep the extension list short, prefer actively maintained ones and insist that updates have a named owner before launch. The wider question of WordPress security is covered on our WordPress website design page.