Ecommerce Website Development Cost in India: The Short Answer
An ecommerce website in India costs Rs. 40,000 to Rs. 1,50,000 on Shopify, Rs. 60,000 to Rs. 2,50,000 on WooCommerce, Rs. 4,00,000 to Rs. 15,00,000 for a custom build, and Rs. 8,00,000 upward for headless. Add 18 percent GST on top of every figure.
That is the build price only. The number that actually decides whether your store makes money is the monthly running cost, and almost nobody puts it in the proposal. A store doing 500 orders a month burns Rs. 20,000 to Rs. 35,000 every month on gateway fees, apps, hosting, notifications and maintenance before a single rupee of ad spend. We have quoted this work for jewellery brands, spice exporters, auto parts distributors and D2C skincare labels, and the pattern never changes: people over-plan the build and under-plan month seven.
Cost by Route: Shopify, WooCommerce, Custom and Headless
There are four honest ways to build the same store in India. They are not better or worse, they suit different order volumes and different levels of operational weirdness.
Shopify: fastest route to revenue
A clean Shopify store on a premium theme, with your catalogue loaded, Razorpay or PayU connected, Shiprocket or Delhivery wired in, and basic automations, runs Rs. 40,000 to Rs. 1,50,000 to build. A properly designed store with custom sections, a landing page system and migrated content sits at Rs. 1,75,000 to Rs. 4,00,000. Build time is two to four weeks. You are renting stability: Shopify handles uptime, PCI, checkout and cart abandonment logic that would cost you lakhs to write. Our detailed Shopify store setup cost breakdown goes deeper on plan tiers.
WooCommerce: cheapest licence, most expensive neglect
WooCommerce builds land between Rs. 60,000 and Rs. 2,50,000. You own the code and the database, there is no per-order platform cut, and you can bend it to any Indian business rule you like. The catch is that you now own security patching, plugin conflicts, backups and speed. A Woo store on Rs. 3,000 a year shared hosting will crawl at 200 concurrent visitors and die on your first Instagram spike. Budget for real hosting from day one, and read our plain English guide to hosting before you pick a plan.
Custom build: when your operations are the product
A custom store on Laravel, Node or Next.js starts at Rs. 4,00,000 and runs to Rs. 15,00,000. This is correct only when your business logic breaks off-the-shelf carts: dealer pricing slabs, credit limits, made-to-order configurators, franchise stock visibility, ERP or Tally sync, or a marketplace with multiple sellers. If your requirement is a nice looking store with 300 SKUs, custom is a waste of Rs. 5 lakh. We cover the trade-off in WordPress vs custom coded.
Headless: speed and scale, at a price
Headless means a Next.js storefront in front of Shopify, Medusa or Saleor. Expect Rs. 8,00,000 to Rs. 30,00,000 and sixteen to twenty-eight weeks. It buys sub-second page loads, superb Core Web Vitals and total design freedom. It also doubles your maintenance surface. Below roughly Rs. 5 crore annual GMV, headless is usually ego, not strategy.
What Actually Moves the Price
Two stores with identical designs can be quoted Rs. 80,000 and Rs. 6,00,000. The gap is never the theme. It is these five things.
Catalogue size, variants and content
Fifty SKUs is a weekend. Five thousand SKUs with size, colour and fabric variants is a data project. Variant explosion is the silent killer: 40 styles times 6 sizes times 5 colours is 1,200 sellable units, each needing its own SKU code, stock number, weight and image mapping. Clean CSV migration costs Rs. 15,000 to Rs. 60,000. Product photography and copywriting for 200 products costs another Rs. 40,000 to Rs. 1,50,000, and clients forget this line item almost every time.
Multi-warehouse, B2B tiers and subscriptions
Selling from one godown is simple. Selling from Pune, Delhi and a Bhiwandi 3PL, with stock split logic and zone-wise shipping rates, adds Rs. 60,000 to Rs. 2,00,000. B2B price tiers, where a distributor sees different rates from a retailer, plus GST-compliant invoicing with HSN codes and place-of-supply logic, add Rs. 75,000 to Rs. 3,00,000. Subscriptions and recurring billing need eMandate or UPI Autopay through your gateway and add Rs. 50,000 to Rs. 1,50,000 plus ongoing dunning management. Each of these is a real engineering feature, not a checkbox.
What You Get at Each Budget Tier
Here is what an honest Indian agency delivers at each price point in 2026. All figures exclude GST.
| Budget | Typical route | What is included | What is NOT included |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rs. 40,000 to Rs. 80,000 | Shopify or Woo, stock theme | Up to 50 products, gateway, one shipping partner, 5 pages, basic SEO | Photography, copy, custom design, automations, ads setup |
| Rs. 80,000 to Rs. 1,75,000 | Premium theme, customised | Up to 500 SKUs, custom homepage and PDP, WhatsApp and email flows, GST invoicing, analytics | ERP sync, multi-warehouse, B2B pricing, app development |
| Rs. 1,75,000 to Rs. 4,00,000 | Fully designed store | Original UI, 2,000+ SKUs, loyalty and referral, abandoned cart recovery, speed work, 3 months support | Mobile app, marketplace logic, subscriptions at scale |
| Rs. 4,00,000 and above | Custom or headless | Bespoke checkout, dealer portals, ERP and Tally sync, multi-warehouse, admin dashboards, load testing | Ongoing feature work after handover, ad budgets |
The Running Costs Nobody Puts in the Quote
This is where stores quietly bleed. Payment gateway is 2 percent plus 18 percent GST on that fee, so your real cost is about 2.36 percent on cards and netbanking. UPI is zero MDR, which is why pushing UPI hard is the single cheapest margin improvement available to an Indian store. Shipping aggregators charge roughly Rs. 26 to Rs. 40 per 500g surface shipment inside a zone, plus a COD collection fee of Rs. 25 to Rs. 40 or 1.5 percent, whichever is higher.
Then the software stack. Shopify apps are the classic leak: five to eight apps at Rs. 800 to Rs. 2,500 each lands you at Rs. 6,000 to Rs. 15,000 a month before you have sold anything. WooCommerce swaps that for annual plugin licences of Rs. 4,000 to Rs. 12,000 each and managed hosting at Rs. 1,500 to Rs. 5,000 a month. WhatsApp notifications cost roughly Rs. 0.12 per utility message plus a platform fee of Rs. 999 to Rs. 3,000 a month, and transactional SMS runs Rs. 0.15 to Rs. 0.20 per message on DLT. Annual maintenance is 15 to 20 percent of build cost, which our website maintenance cost guide breaks down properly.
COD and RTO: The Number That Quietly Destroys Margin
This is the most important section in this article and it has nothing to do with development.
In India, 55 to 70 percent of orders outside metros are cash on delivery. Of those COD orders, 15 to 35 percent come back as RTO, return to origin, depending on category. Fashion and mobile accessories sit at the top of that range. Every RTO costs you forward freight, reverse freight, packaging and handling, so roughly Rs. 120 to Rs. 200 vanishes on an order that earned you nothing.
Run the maths on 1,000 orders at Rs. 1,200 average value and 30 percent gross margin. Gross profit looks like Rs. 3,60,000. Now assume 60 percent COD and 25 percent RTO on that slice: 150 orders come back, costing about Rs. 24,000 in wasted logistics, and you also lose the margin you had booked on them. Add gateway fees of roughly Rs. 11,300 on the prepaid half. Your real profit is closer to Rs. 2,20,000, and that is before ads. A store that ignores RTO can be growing revenue 40 percent a year while losing money.
The fixes are cheap and should be in your build: a small prepaid discount of 5 percent, OTP verification on COD orders above Rs. 2,000, address quality checks, a pincode blocklist for chronic RTO clusters, and a WhatsApp order confirmation before dispatch. Together these routinely cut RTO by a third. Insist your developer builds them in version one, not version three.
GST, Payment Terms and What the Invoice Really Says
Development services attract 18 percent GST. A Rs. 2,00,000 build is a Rs. 2,36,000 cheque. If you are GST registered, you claim input tax credit and the effective cost returns to Rs. 2,00,000, so always ask for a proper tax invoice with the agency GSTIN. A quote with no GST line is either an unregistered freelancer or a surprise waiting for you at handover.
Standard payment terms in India are 40 percent advance, 30 percent at design sign-off, 30 percent before go-live. Never pay 100 percent upfront. Also get three things in writing: who owns the code and design files, what the post-launch support window covers, and the hourly or per-change rate afterwards, typically Rs. 800 to Rs. 2,500 an hour.
Realistic Launch Timelines in 2026
Shopify with a premium theme and under 200 SKUs: two to four weeks. WooCommerce with custom design: four to eight weeks. A custom build with dealer logic and ERP sync: twelve to twenty-four weeks. Headless: sixteen to twenty-eight weeks.
The delay is almost never the code. It is product photos, product descriptions, the GST and HSN sheet, courier account activation, and the payment gateway KYC, which alone takes three to ten working days and needs your GST certificate, bank proof and website policy pages live. Get gateway KYC started in week one. We have watched Rs. 3 lakh builds sit finished for eleven days waiting on a director PAN upload.
Get a Line by Line Ecommerce Quote
Tell us your catalogue size, order volume and COD share. We will send a written quote with build cost, monthly running cost and a realistic launch date, with nothing hidden.
Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Custom by Real Monthly Cost
Build price is a one-time decision. Monthly cost is the one you live with. These are all-in platform costs including plan or hosting, apps or plugins, gateway fees at 2.36 percent on an average order value of Rs. 1,200, notifications and maintenance. Shipping and ad spend are excluded.
| Monthly orders | Shopify | WooCommerce | Custom build |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 orders (Rs. 1.2 lakh GMV) | Rs. 9,000 to Rs. 14,000 | Rs. 10,000 to Rs. 16,000 | Rs. 25,000 plus, clear overkill |
| 500 orders (Rs. 6 lakh GMV) | Rs. 22,000 to Rs. 35,000 | Rs. 20,000 to Rs. 34,000 | Rs. 45,000 to Rs. 70,000 |
| 2,000 orders (Rs. 24 lakh GMV) | Rs. 75,000 to Rs. 1,10,000 | Rs. 60,000 to Rs. 95,000 | Rs. 85,000 to Rs. 1,40,000 |
| 10,000 orders (Rs. 1.2 crore GMV) | Rs. 3,20,000 to Rs. 4,50,000 | Rs. 2,60,000 to Rs. 3,60,000 | Rs. 2,40,000 to Rs. 3,50,000 |
Read the bottom row carefully. At Rs. 1.2 crore GMV the platform fee is noise and the payment gateway is nearly everything, roughly Rs. 2.8 lakh a month. That is the point where custom starts winning, because you can negotiate MDR down to 1.6 percent, push UPI share to 60 percent and delete Rs. 15,000 of monthly apps. Below Rs. 25 lakh monthly GMV, that negotiating power does not exist and rebuilding is a distraction.
When You Should Not Build a Store Yet
Here is the advice that loses us projects and earns us clients. If you have never sold your product online, do not spend Rs. 2 lakh on a website. Spend Rs. 20,000 proving demand first.
Sell on marketplaces first
Amazon and Flipkart take 15 to 30 percent in commission plus fees, which hurts. They also hand you buyers you cannot buy for that price. Listing 30 SKUs properly costs Rs. 15,000 to Rs. 40,000 including cataloguing. Three months there tells you your true conversion rate, your return rate, your best selling variant and your realistic average order value. Every one of those numbers makes your eventual website cheaper and better specified. Meesho and JioMart work similarly for value categories.
Or run a WhatsApp catalogue
For jewellery, sarees, furniture, sweets, plants, custom cakes and most made-to-order businesses, a WhatsApp Business catalogue plus a Rs. 8,000 landing page outperforms a Rs. 1,50,000 store for the first year. Margins stay intact because there is no gateway cut on UPI transfers, RTO is near zero because you confirm before dispatch, and you get to talk to buyers. Build the store when you are turning down orders because WhatsApp cannot keep up, or when you cross roughly 300 orders a month. Until then, put the money into demand generation instead.
Red Flags in an Ecommerce Quote
Watch for these five lines. “Unlimited products” usually means nobody has thought about migration or search performance. “SEO friendly” with no deliverable list means nothing was planned. “Payment gateway integration” without naming the gateway hides who does the KYC chasing. A quote with no monthly cost estimate is incomplete by definition. And “we will discuss maintenance after launch” is how a Rs. 90,000 build becomes a Rs. 40,000 annual surprise.
A good brief is short and specific: number of SKUs and variants, current or expected monthly orders, COD share, warehouses, whether you need B2B pricing or subscriptions, your ERP or Tally setup, and who writes the product copy. Send that to three agencies and the quotes become comparable instantly. If you want ours, our web development team replies with a written scope, not a slide deck.
Also read: our Shopify store setup cost in India guide, the full website development cost in Pune 2026 breakdown, and what website maintenance actually costs.
Payments are the line item most store owners underestimate. We compare fees, settlement times and setup for every major provider in our guide to payment gateway charges in India.
