An online store in India costs roughly ₹40,000 to ₹1,50,000 to build on Shopify or WooCommerce, and ₹3,00,000 upwards for a custom build. The number that catches people out is the running cost: for a store shipping about 1,500 orders a year, platform fees, payment charges, shipping, RTO losses on cash on delivery, packaging and product photography come to roughly ₹3–₹5 lakh over three years, before a single rupee of advertising.
Put plainly, the website is usually 10–20 per cent of what an online store costs you. This guide breaks every line down in rupees, compares three-year totals across four routes, and says where a marketplace beats a store of your own.
What each platform actually costs
Shopify
Shopify’s Basic plan runs about ₹2,000–₹2,500 a month in India depending on whether you pay yearly, and the next tier is roughly three to four times that. The subscription is the honest, predictable part. The apps are not.
A typical Indian store pays for a reviews app, a WhatsApp marketing app, a COD-verification app, a page builder and a bundles app. At ₹700–₹2,000 a month each, ₹4,000–₹8,000 a month in apps is normal, not extravagant. Add ₹18,000–₹30,000 once for a paid theme if the free ones do not fit.
Check one line before you commit: Shopify charges an extra transaction fee — 2 per cent on Basic, less on higher plans — when you use a third-party gateway instead of Shopify Payments. Confirm in writing whether Shopify Payments is live on your account in India. If it is not, that 2 per cent sits on top of your Razorpay or PhonePe charge: about ₹36,000 a year on ₹18 lakh of sales.
Agency setup on Shopify in India runs ₹40,000–₹1,20,000 for design, product upload, gateway, shipping and GST invoicing.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce itself is free; everything around it is not. Shared hosting at ₹300 a month will not hold a store with a live cart and a growing order table — budget ₹800–₹2,500 a month for managed WordPress or a small VPS. Plugin licences run ₹0–₹25,000 a year depending on how unusual your requirements are; the Razorpay, Cashfree and Shiprocket plugins are free, which covers most Indian stores. A decent premium theme is ₹5,000–₹10,000 a year.
Development is ₹50,000–₹1,50,000 for a store that is genuinely configured rather than a theme demo with your logo dropped in. The real long-term cost is maintenance: WordPress, WooCommerce and a dozen plugins update on their own schedules, and a checkout that broke three days ago is expensive in a way a broken brochure page never is. Budget a monthly care plan from day one.
Custom build
A fully custom store — your own front end, your own cart, an admin built around your process — starts around ₹3,00,000 and runs past ₹10,00,000. It is right when a rule the platforms cannot express sits at the centre of your business: dealer-specific pricing, a product configurator, B2B quantity slabs, live ERP or Tally sync, or a catalogue in the tens of thousands. It is wrong for a 100-product D2C brand, and an agency that pushes it there is selling hours. If what you actually need is a system rather than a shop, custom software is the honest heading for that budget.
Marketplace only
Listing on Amazon, Flipkart or Meesho costs nothing to start. You pay a referral fee that varies by category, commonly 2–20 per cent, plus a closing fee, a shipping fee if you use their logistics, and 18 per cent GST on all of those. All in, expect 20–35 per cent of order value to stay with the marketplace, and more in fashion. Sellers on ONDC-connected apps report lower take rates; treat that as a second channel rather than a replacement.
The running costs nobody quotes you
Payment gateway, and the GST on top of it
UPI carries zero merchant discount rate by regulation, so UPI collections cost you nothing or close to it. Cards, net banking and wallets are about 2 per cent, and 18 per cent GST applies to the gateway fee itself — so 2 per cent is really 2.36 per cent. With a typical Indian split of roughly half UPI and half everything else, budget 1.1–1.4 per cent of collected revenue. Which gateway you pick matters far less than the gap between prepaid and COD.
Shipping, cash on delivery and RTO
Through an aggregator such as Shiprocket, or a direct Delhivery account once volume justifies it, a 500 g surface shipment costs about ₹35 within your zone and ₹60–₹90 across the country. COD adds ₹25–₹40 or 1.5 per cent of the order, whichever is higher, and the money reaches your bank five to eight days later.
Then there is RTO. Between 15 and 30 per cent of COD orders come back undelivered in most categories. You pay the forward leg, the return leg and the packaging, and you earn nothing — roughly ₹120–₹180 per failed order, plus a product that comes back scuffed. If half your orders are COD and a fifth of those return, a store doing 1,500 orders a year loses about ₹22,000 a year to RTO alone.
Things that measurably reduce it:
- Confirm every COD order on WhatsApp before dispatch, and cancel the ones nobody answers.
- Offer a small prepaid incentive — ₹50 off or 5 per cent usually moves a real share of orders to UPI.
- Validate the address and phone number at checkout. A missing landmark is a genuine cause of failed delivery in India.
- Keep a block list of pin codes and repeat-return customers, and cap COD above a chosen order value.
Packaging, photography and returns
Packaging is ₹8–₹25 an order once you count tape, filler and a printed invoice. Photography is the line most first-time sellers leave out: ₹150–₹500 per SKU for clean white-background studio shots, ₹1,000 upwards per look with a model. A 100-product catalogue is therefore ₹20,000–₹50,000, and it repeats every season. A good phone in daylight against a white sheet is genuinely acceptable for a first catalogue, and we say that rather than quoting a shoot nobody needs yet.
Returns beyond RTO depend on category: 5–10 per cent for most goods, 25–40 per cent in apparel and footwear where size is a guess. If you sell clothing, model your unit economics at a 30 per cent return rate or your margin sheet is fiction.
Three-year cost of ownership, compared
The assumptions: 100 products, 1,500 orders a year at an average order value of ₹1,200 — about ₹18 lakh of sales a year and ₹54 lakh over three years, with half the orders on COD. Build costs are shown as a range; the totals use the middle of that range.
| Cost head (3 years) | Marketplace only | Shopify | WooCommerce | Custom build |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Build or setup (one time) | ₹0 | ₹40,000–₹1,20,000 | ₹50,000–₹1,50,000 | ₹3,00,000–₹10,00,000 |
| Platform or hosting | ₹0 | ₹82,800 | ₹36,000 | ₹1,08,000 |
| Apps, plugins, licences | ₹0 | ₹54,000 | ₹24,000 | ₹0 |
| Marketplace commission | ₹13,50,000 | ₹0 | ₹0 | ₹0 |
| Payment gateway and platform fees | Included above | ₹1,73,000 | ₹65,000 | ₹65,000 |
| Shipping, RTO, packaging | Included above | ₹4,50,000 | ₹4,50,000 | ₹4,50,000 |
| Product photography | ₹60,000 | ₹60,000 | ₹60,000 | ₹60,000 |
| Maintenance and support | ₹0 | ₹54,000 | ₹54,000 | ₹1,80,000 |
| Traffic: ads, content, SEO | ₹0 (you rent theirs) | ₹1,80,000+ | ₹1,80,000+ | ₹1,80,000+ |
| Three-year total | ₹14,10,000 | ₹11,33,800 | ₹9,69,000 | ₹14,43,000 |
Read that table twice before drawing a conclusion. On ₹54 lakh of sales every route lands between roughly 18 and 27 per cent of revenue, far closer than the marketplace-versus-own-store argument usually suggests. The commission is high, but it buys demand. The own-store columns carry a marketing line of ₹1,80,000 that is a floor, not a forecast — on your own site you pay for the traffic a marketplace hands you, through Google Shopping, Meta ads, or content and SEO services that take six months to compound. Halve the volume and your fixed costs dominate, so the marketplace wins outright. Triple it, especially with repeat buyers, and your own store wins by a wide margin, because the second sale to the same customer costs one WhatsApp message.
The Shopify payment row assumes the extra third-party transaction fee applies. If Shopify Payments is available on your account, take ₹1,08,000 off that column and the two hosted platforms sit within touching distance of each other.
When a marketplace is the honest answer
A store of your own is worth building when you can bring your own traffic. If you cannot, you are paying to host an empty shop. Use this test: of the orders you expect next month, what share would come from people who already know you — WhatsApp contacts, Instagram followers, walk-in customers, referrals? Under about 30 per cent, sell on a marketplace first and build the store once demand is proven.
Cases where we tell people not to build a store yet:
- Under about 100 orders a month, all arriving from Instagram. A catalogue on Instagram, a Razorpay payment link and a Shiprocket account cost nothing and work.
- One product, or made-to-order work. A single page with a WhatsApp button converts better than a cart with one item in it.
- A category where marketplaces and price-comparison portals will outrank you all year whatever you spend. Search your own product and see who owns the first page.
- No stock discipline yet. A store showing inventory you do not have generates refunds, not revenue.
The reverse holds just as firmly. Once repeat purchase is real, marketplace fees get expensive quickly, the platform keeps the customer relationship, and you cannot message that buyer again. That is when your own store pays for itself in months rather than years.
What we charge, and when not to hire us
For transparency, since this is our own guide: the Codelith Lab E-commerce Store package is ₹99,999 plus 18 per cent GST — WooCommerce, Shopify or custom, up to 100 products, Razorpay/PhonePe/UPI, Shiprocket or Delhivery, GST invoices, abandoned-cart recovery over WhatsApp, 90 days of support, delivered in three to four weeks. A care plan afterwards is ₹1,499 a month. Payment is 50 per cent to start and 50 per cent at launch, with a GST invoice at each milestone. Domain, hosting, gateway and analytics accounts are always created in your name, so nothing is held hostage if you leave.
If you are not yet sure the demand exists, a ₹24,999 business website with a WhatsApp order button is the better first spend, and we say so on calls more often than you might expect. Our office is in Pune, roughly 60 per cent of clients are elsewhere in India, and delivery is remote by default: a WhatsApp group for daily updates, Google Meet for reviews, a 40-point pre-launch checklist. For the wider picture before you specialise into commerce, see web development in India; if the shop mostly needs enquiries rather than a cart, small business websites is the closer fit.
Eight checks before you pay anyone
- Ask for the full app or plugin list with monthly prices attached. A quote without it is not a quote.
- Confirm the domain, hosting, payment gateway and analytics accounts will be in your company’s name, with you as the owner.
- Ask what happens the day support ends: what a care plan costs, what it covers, how fast a broken checkout gets fixed.
- Get the gateway’s rate in writing, including 18 per cent GST on the fee, and check whether the platform adds a transaction fee of its own.
- Ask for the COD plan — confirmation flow, prepaid incentive, address checks, pin-code blocking. A developer who has not thought about RTO has not built an Indian store before.
- Count your SKUs, multiply by the photography rate, and put that number in the budget on day one.
- Insist on GST invoices and a written milestone schedule. Half now and half at launch is normal; full payment upfront is not.
- Open a store the team has built, on your phone, on mobile data. We keep demo sites at codelithlabdemo.online for exactly this — they are demonstrations we built, not client sites.
The short version
- Building costs ₹40,000–₹1,50,000 on Shopify or WooCommerce and ₹3,00,000 upwards for custom. Running the store for three years costs several times the build.
- The India-specific lines that break budgets are RTO on COD, shipping, photography and 18 per cent GST on every fee — not the design.
- Marketplaces take 20–35 per cent of order value but supply the customers. Build your own store when you can bring your own traffic, or when repeat purchase is real.
- Whatever you build, keep the domain, hosting, gateway and analytics in your own name.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to build an e-commerce website in India?
Between ₹40,000 and ₹1,50,000 for a properly configured Shopify or WooCommerce store with payments, shipping and GST invoicing, and ₹3,00,000 upwards for a custom build. The Codelith Lab E-commerce Store package is ₹99,999 plus 18 per cent GST for up to 100 products. Budget separately for running costs, which usually total several times the build over three years.
Is Shopify or WooCommerce cheaper to run in India?
WooCommerce, usually. Over three years a comparable store came to about ₹9.7 lakh on WooCommerce against ₹11.3 lakh on Shopify in the worked example above, mostly because of Shopify’s subscription, paid apps and the extra transaction fee charged when you use a third-party gateway. Shopify buys you fewer maintenance headaches, which is worth real money if nobody on your team will manage updates.
What are the hidden running costs of an online store in India?
Gateway charges of about 2 per cent plus 18 per cent GST on that fee, shipping at ₹35–₹90 a parcel, COD handling, RTO losses on undelivered cash orders, packaging at ₹8–₹25 an order, photography at ₹150–₹500 per SKU, returns, and platform or plugin renewals. For a store doing 1,500 orders a year these come to roughly ₹3–₹5 lakh over three years.
Should I sell on Amazon or Flipkart instead of building my own store?
If most of your orders would come from strangers rather than people who already know you, yes — start on a marketplace. You give up 20–35 per cent of order value all in, but that fee buys demand you would otherwise pay for in advertising. Build your own store once repeat purchase is real, because marketplaces keep the customer relationship and you cannot contact that buyer again.
How much does cash on delivery actually cost an Indian store?
A COD handling fee of roughly ₹25–₹40 or 1.5 per cent per order, remittance delayed five to eight days, and RTO on 15–30 per cent of COD orders. Each return costs the forward leg, the return leg and the packaging — about ₹120–₹180 with no revenue against it. WhatsApp confirmation before dispatch and a small prepaid incentive are the two cheapest ways to cut it.
