Shopify Payments Does Not Work in India. That Costs You 2%.

There are two costs and they get confused constantly. Design and build with us runs from INR 85,000 to INR 7,00,000 depending on how much is designed rather than configured, and the three tiers above set out what sits in each band. Then there is what Shopify costs you to run, which never stops. The Basic plan is INR 1,994 a month, or INR 1,499 on annual billing, and Grow and Advanced are INR 7,447 and INR 30,164. On top of that your payment gateway takes its cut, and because Shopify Payments is not available in India, Shopify adds a further 2 percent on Basic for using a third-party provider. Then the apps. For a small store the running cost is commonly somewhere between INR 4,000 and INR 15,000 a month plus the percentages, and the percentages are the part that grows with you.

Usually not, and we will say so even though custom theme work is the better project for us. The Shopify Theme Store listed 1,326 themes when we last checked, of which 1,302 are paid, with prices on the browse page from 100 to 500 US dollars. With that much choice, a theme that fits your brand closely enough to customise almost always exists. A good one adjusted carefully tends to beat a custom build done to the same budget, because the money goes into your specific needs rather than into rebuilding things the theme already did well. A custom theme earns its cost when the store genuinely has to look unlike anything else on the platform, when you have an unusual merchandising requirement, or at Plus-level scale. Browse the theme store properly for an hour before you let anybody quote you one.

Yes, and it is defined work rather than something that happens alongside the build. Products, variants, customers and order history move across, and so do the URLs, which is the part that gets fumbled most often. Every old product and collection address needs mapping to its Shopify equivalent, because sending everything to the homepage throws away whatever those pages had earned in search. We map them before launch and verify them after. Expect two to four weeks on top of the build depending on catalogue size and how clean the existing data is. Shopify also uses a fixed URL structure, with /products/ and /collections/ paths, which you cannot change, so the redirect map is not optional on any move.

It works, and it costs you extra, and you should know both halves. Shopify Payments, the built-in product, is available in 41 countries and India is not among them, so every Indian store has to use a third-party provider such as Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree or CCAvenue. All of them integrate with Shopify and work fine. The catch is that Shopify charges an additional fee for using a provider that is not its own: 2 percent on Basic, 1 percent on Grow, 0.6 percent on Advanced and 0.2 percent on Plus. That sits on top of whatever your gateway charges, so an Indian seller on Basic is realistically paying around 4 percent of each order between the two. It is not a penalty and there is nothing you can do to avoid it, but it belongs in every comparison you make between Shopify and anything else, and it is the strongest single argument for moving up a plan as your turnover grows.

Work it out rather than guess, because the answer is a number. Moving from Basic to Grow costs about INR 5,453 more a month and saves one percent of revenue, so it starts paying for itself at roughly INR 5.5 lakh a month in sales. Moving from Grow to Advanced costs about INR 22,717 more and saves 0.4 percent, so that one turns over at around INR 57 lakh a month. Those are our calculations from Shopify’s published India prices, so check them against your own figures. The practical advice is to start on Basic unless you are already above the first threshold, and to put a reminder in the diary to re-check every quarter, because most stores that are overpaying are overpaying because nobody revisited the decision.

Neither is better in the abstract and we build both. Shopify is usually right when nobody in your business will own updates and security, when you want to be live quickly, and when your selling rules are ordinary. WooCommerce is usually right when you have unusual requirements, an existing WordPress site, or enough turnover that paying percentages forever costs more than hosting and maintaining your own. The Indian wrinkle is the third-party gateway fee above, which pushes the crossover point lower here than it would be in a country where Shopify Payments is available. We set out the other side of this on our WooCommerce development page, including what owning it actually costs.

Fewer than you will be offered. Most stores genuinely need a review app, something for email, and one app for whatever makes their business unusual. Everything else should wait until you can point at the problem it solves. App pricing is monthly and per app, which is how a store ends up with a bill nobody remembers agreeing to, so we fix the list before the build, total it, and write it down. We also check whether your theme or Shopify itself already does the job, because paying monthly for something you already have is more common than it should be.

Yes, comfortably, and this is rarely the constraint people expect it to be. Shopify handles large product counts without the database considerations you would think about on a self-hosted platform, because that is their problem rather than yours. Where large catalogues do create work is in merchandising: collection structure, filtering, search and how customers actually find things. That is design and configuration work rather than a platform limit, and it is worth budgeting for separately on any store above a few hundred products.

Yes, and it is one of the better reasons to choose it. Multiple currencies, international shipping and market-specific pricing are handled well and without much fuss. The things that need real thought are not technical: which markets you can actually fulfil to, how duties and returns work for those customers, and what your delivery promise is. Those are business decisions with build consequences, so we settle them before launch rather than discovering them with the first overseas order.

The store goes offline. This is the honest cost of a hosted platform and it is worth being clear-eyed about: you are renting, and the shop closes when the rent stops. Your data remains exportable, so you are not locked out of your own products and customers, but the storefront itself is not something you keep. If permanence and ownership matter more to you than convenience, that is a genuine argument for a self-hosted platform, and we would rather you weighed it now than discovered it later.

Yes, and a good deal of our Shopify work is exactly that. We start by looking at what is there, because inherited stores usually carry apps nobody can account for, theme edits made directly in the published theme, and quite often a plan that stopped being the right one a year ago. That review 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 a plan change rather than a rebuild, and we will tell you when that is the case.

The platform is neither an advantage nor a handicap, whatever you have read. Shopify gives you a clean technical base and takes some decisions out of your hands, including the URL structure, which is fixed. What decides rankings is collection and product page content, how filtering is handled, and whether anybody is doing the work. That is separate from the build and we cover it on our ecommerce SEO page. What we do during the build is avoid creating problems, mainly by mapping redirects properly on a migration.

Shopify’s tax settings let you configure tax rates, but GST-compliant invoicing in the format Indian businesses need is generally handled either by an app or by your accounting system rather than by Shopify natively. We are designers and developers, not tax advisers, so the way we handle this is to set up whatever your accountant specifies and to raise it early rather than at launch. Ask your CA what they need on the invoice before the build starts, because retrofitting it is more annoying than building it in.

Plus is the enterprise tier, starting around INR 1,75,000 a month, and the honest answer for most businesses reading this page is no. What it buys is a lower third-party gateway fee at 0.2 percent, more control over the checkout, higher limits and dedicated support. The gateway fee alone means it starts making arithmetic sense at serious volume, and if you are anywhere near that level you will already know. If somebody is recommending Plus to a store doing a few lakh a month, ask them to show you the calculation.

Yes. We are a Shopify development company India wide, based in Vikaspuri, West Delhi, and we work with clients across the rest of India and overseas in the UAE, the UK and the USA. Anyone looking for a Shopify developer in Delhi is welcome at the studio, and clients who would rather work with a Shopify design agency Delhi NCR based but meet over video are served exactly the same way. If you are after a Shopify expert India wide rather than one you can sit across a table from, that is the common case and it changes nothing. Most of our store builds run remotely and it makes no difference to the result.