What a website to ERP or CRM integration costs in India in 2026
Budget Rs. 25,000 to Rs. 1,20,000 if a ready connector already exists for your stack, Rs. 1,50,000 to Rs. 3,50,000 for a middleware build, and Rs. 2,50,000 to Rs. 9,00,000 for custom API work against an older or on-premise ERP. Add 18 percent GST on every rupee of that.
The spread is that wide because you are not buying code. You are buying certainty that a record created in one system appears correctly in another, every time, without a human retyping it. Whether that is cheap or expensive depends almost entirely on what your ERP vendor will expose, and how clean your data is.
This is written for the owner or IT manager who already has a website and an ERP or CRM, and is tired of the two never speaking to each other.
The business case, stated plainly
An enquiry sitting in an inbox nobody checks is the most expensive bug in most Indian companies. It does not throw an error. It does not appear on any dashboard. It simply ages until the buyer signs with a competitor who called back on the same day.
The mechanism is always the same. The form emails a shared address that forwards to two or three people, each assuming one of the others has picked it up. On a busy day it goes unread, on a holiday it goes unread for three days, and when the person who used to watch that inbox resigns, nobody inherits the habit. There is no queue, no owner, no timestamp and no follow-up rule, so the failure is invisible by design.
The same mechanism eats money elsewhere. Orders retyped from the website into the ERP arrive with a wrong quantity or a wrong GST rate. Stock shown on the site is yesterday’s stock, so you sell what you do not have and then apologise. Dispatch details sit in the ERP while the customer calls sales to ask where the material is. None of it shows up as a line item in your accounts, which is exactly why it survives for years.
Integration is worth buying when you can name the leak. If you cannot say in one sentence which record is being lost or retyped, and roughly how often, you are not ready to spend on this yet.
The four integration shapes that cover most Indian companies
Nearly every request is one of four shapes, or two combined. Naming your shape before you call vendors saves a fortnight of vague proposals.
Website form into CRM
The cheapest and highest return of the four. Every enquiry becomes a lead record with a source, owner, stage and timestamp. The value is not the data transfer, it is that an unassigned lead becomes visible and can trigger a reminder. Typical cost is Rs. 25,000 to Rs. 90,000 with a mainstream cloud CRM.
Website orders into ERP
An order placed online creates a sales order in the ERP with the right item codes, tax fields, price list and customer master link. Most of the real work sits here, because your website’s product identifiers and your ERP’s item codes were never designed to match. Budget Rs. 1,50,000 to Rs. 5,00,000 depending on the ERP and how many order types exist.
Live stock and price from the ERP onto the website
The ERP becomes the single source of truth and the website reads from it. The design decision is sync frequency, not technology. Most businesses do not need true real-time stock, they need stock never more than fifteen minutes stale plus a safety buffer on fast-moving items. Costs sit between Rs. 1,00,000 and Rs. 3,50,000, driven mainly by catalogue size.
Invoice and dispatch status back to the customer
Invoice number, e-way bill status, courier partner and tracking link pushed from the ERP to the customer’s account page, or to WhatsApp and email. This is the shape that cuts inbound “where is my order” calls, and the easiest to justify to a finance head because the saving is a headcount conversation. Budget Rs. 80,000 to Rs. 2,50,000.
The three technical routes, and when each is right
Route 1: the native connector
Your ERP or CRM vendor, or a marketplace app, already publishes a connector for your website platform, so you configure rather than build. This is the right answer far more often than agencies admit, and a good vendor will say so instead of quoting a custom build. The limit is rigidity: if the connector maps fields its own way and your business needs a different mapping, you hit a wall you cannot code around.
Route 2: middleware or iPaaS
A platform sits between the two systems, holds the mapping rules, retries failures and logs every record it moved. You pay a build fee plus a monthly or per-task platform fee. Best value for most mid-sized Indian businesses, because the hard parts, retries, queues and error visibility, are bought rather than written. The catch is the recurring fee, and a heavy sync pushing you into a higher usage tier without warning.
Route 3: custom API work
Your developer writes the integration directly against both systems. Full control, no platform fee, and the only workable option when the ERP is on-premise, heavily customised, or needs a database-level or file-based bridge. It is also the most expensive to own, because every retry, log and alert is something you paid to build. Scope it with the same discipline as custom web application development.
| Route | One-time cost | Ongoing | Right when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Native connector | Rs. 25,000 to Rs. 1,20,000 | App or licence fee | Mainstream cloud ERP or CRM, standard fields, no odd rules |
| Middleware or iPaaS | Rs. 1,50,000 to Rs. 3,50,000 | Rs. 2,000 to Rs. 25,000 a month | Two or three systems, real mapping rules, you want error visibility |
| Custom API work | Rs. 2,50,000 to Rs. 9,00,000 | AMC, usually 15 to 20 percent a year | On-premise or customised ERP, no usable API, unusual logic |
What actually drives your price
The first question: does your ERP have a documented API
Ask your ERP vendor for API documentation before you ask any agency for a quote. If it exists and is public, you are in the lower half of every band above. If the answer is “we can arrange it”, expect a licence fee and a delay. If the answer is a database dump or a folder of text files, you are in custom territory and the price roughly doubles, because the integration must now do the validation an API would have done for you.
Four other things move the number. On-premise ERPs need a tunnel, a static IP or a middleware agent inside your network, adding setup cost and a security review. Dirty data, meaning duplicate customer masters and item codes that do not match your website’s SKUs, is billed as cleanup before sync code is useful at all. Field count matters directly: a twelve field order is a week, a forty field order with tax logic and multiple warehouses is a month. And real-time two-way sync costs roughly twice a scheduled one-way push, because you now have to handle conflicts.
The traps that actually break these projects
These are failure modes, not risks. Each is common enough that you should ask your vendor how they handle it before signing.
- Nobody owns the field mapping. The agency assumes your ERP partner will confirm which field holds the GSTIN. The ERP partner assumes the agency knows. The project stalls three weeks over one afternoon of work. Name the person on your side who signs the mapping sheet.
- Duplicate records. One customer becomes three because the sync matched on name instead of phone or GSTIN. Agree the unique key in writing on day one, and decide whether a match updates or creates.
- Sync loops. The ERP updates the website, that update fires a webhook back to the ERP, and the two bounce a record between them thousands of times a day. Fixed by marking machine-written updates so they never re-trigger, which is easy to design in and painful to retrofit.
- No error alerting. The worst one. A sync fails silently and nobody notices for weeks, by which time stock and orders have drifted apart and reconciliation is manual. Insist on a failure alert to a person, on WhatsApp or email, not just a log file nobody opens.
- The ERP vendor charges for API access. Some treat the API as a paid module or a higher licence tier. Find out before you approve a budget, not in month two.
- Timezone and rounding drift. Store timestamps in UTC, display IST, and agree tax rounding to the paisa. Both sound trivial and both make finance reject the integration.
What the project timeline actually looks like
A serious integration is not a two-week job, and a vendor promising one has not asked enough questions. Below is a realistic shape for a mid-sized build, with the payment milestones a sensible contract uses.
| Phase | Duration | You sign off on | Payment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discovery and field mapping | 1 to 2 weeks | Mapping sheet, unique keys, sync direction | 20 percent |
| Sandbox build | 2 to 4 weeks | Test records flowing both ways | 30 percent |
| Data cleanup and dry run | 1 to 2 weeks | Duplicate report, reconciliation of a sample day | 20 percent |
| Go live and parallel run | 2 weeks | Manual and automated results matching | 20 percent |
| Handover | 3 to 5 days | Documents, credentials, repository access | 10 percent |
The parallel run matters more than anything else on that list. For two weeks you keep running the manual process alongside the automated one and compare both at the end of each day. It is the only cheap way to catch a mapping error before it becomes a month of wrong invoices.
What a serious vendor puts in writing before any code
Integration work is unusually easy to sell vaguely, so the contract is your protection. A proposal that does not answer these points is not a proposal, it is a brochure.
Insist on a written scope listing every field, direction and trigger, not a paragraph saying “website and ERP will be integrated”. Insist you own the code and the repository from day one, held in your own organisation account rather than the agency’s personal account. Ask what happens if the vendor disappears, and make sure the answer is that your mapping document and repository let another team continue. Get change requests priced in advance, at a published hourly rate or as a change bucket, so a new field in month three is not a renegotiation. And agree a support SLA in hours for a stopped sync, since a broken integration is an operations outage, not a cosmetic bug. The same questions apply to any custom software engagement and to your website maintenance arrangement.
Stop retyping orders between two systems
Tell us your ERP or CRM and what is moving by hand today. You get a straight answer on which of the three routes fits, a realistic price band and a timeline, before you commit to anything.
What the handover must include
Most integrations are handed over as a login and a verbal explanation. That is how a company ends up unable to change a single field two years later. Three artefacts make the difference.
The mapping document is the real deliverable: one row per field showing the website field, the ERP or CRM field, the direction, the transformation rule and what happens when the value is blank or invalid. Anyone competent should be able to rebuild the integration from this sheet alone. Error log access means your own people can see which records failed and why, without raising a ticket. And the re-run procedure answers the question every business eventually asks at 6pm on a Saturday: the sync was down since morning, how do we push today’s thirty orders through now. Without it, every outage becomes a paid support call.
Ask for all three as a condition of the final payment. A vendor who resists is telling you something useful.
GST, licences and the costs that arrive later
Integration work is a service, so 18 percent GST applies to the build, any retainer and AMC. A registered business normally takes input credit on this, making it a cash flow item rather than a cost, but it still has to sit in the approved budget. Our note on GST on website and software services covers the invoicing detail.
Three costs are routinely left out of first-round proposals. ERP API licences, where the vendor charges for the module or a higher tier before you can connect at all. Platform or task fees on middleware, which scale with volume, so a festive spike quietly moves you up a tier. And AMC on custom work, typically 15 to 20 percent of build cost a year, buying monitoring, API version changes and small mapping edits. Ask for the three year total, not the build price, and compare vendors on that number.
When a scheduled CSV export is enough and you should not buy this
Here is the part most agencies will not write. If you process a small number of orders a day, one person already handles them reliably, and nothing on your website depends on live stock, a live integration is not worth the money. A scheduled export, meaning a CSV the ERP produces every night and the website imports, or the reverse, costs a fraction of the bands above and fails in ways you can see and fix yourself.
Scheduled export is genuinely right when the data only needs to be correct once a day, when volume is low enough that a human can eyeball the file, when the ERP has no API and the vendor wants a large sum to provide one, or when you are still changing your process every few weeks so any mapping agreed today is obsolete by next quarter. Stabilise the process first, then automate it.
Move to a live integration when one of three things is true. Stock accuracy affects revenue because you are overselling. Volume has passed the point where a person can keep up, usually past forty to fifty orders a day. Or the delay itself is the problem, as with enquiries, where a lead reaching sales six hours late is worth far less than one that reaches them in six minutes. Planning a storefront rebuild too? Read the ecommerce build cost guide first, because integration is much cheaper to design in than to bolt on.
Our team is based in Pune and builds these integrations for manufacturers, distributors and service companies across India, so we have seen most ERP and CRM combinations at least once. The first conversation is usually about whether you need route one, two or three, and sometimes the answer is none of them yet.
Also read: our breakdowns of custom web application development cost in India, website maintenance cost in India and website development cost in India.
