This is for brands selling physical products who want to be live in weeks and would rather pay a monthly platform fee than maintain servers. It is not for you if you need deeply custom checkout logic, sell primarily B2B with negotiated per-customer pricing, or expect to run on ₹0 of recurring cost — in those cases WooCommerce or a custom build will serve you better, and we will say so on the call.
The India-specific part
Choosing a Shopify development company on portfolio screenshots alone skips the part that decides whether a store makes money in India. Shopify Payments is not offered to Indian merchants. Your checkout runs on a third-party gateway — Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree or CCAvenue — which means gateway onboarding, KYC, and settlement cycles are a real part of the project timeline rather than a checkbox. Shopify also applies its own platform fee on third-party gateways on lower plans, so confirm the current rate for the plan you pick: it applies to every order you ever take.
Cash on delivery still carries a meaningful share of orders in most Indian categories, and Shopify does not handle COD serviceability natively. You need a pincode-check app so a customer in a non-serviceable pincode is told at the product page rather than at checkout, plus a rule set for which order values are allowed on COD at all. Getting this wrong produces RTO — return to origin — and RTO is the line item that quietly destroys margin on Indian D2C.
Shopify's built-in order confirmation is not a GST-compliant tax invoice. If you are registered, you need an invoicing app that puts GSTIN, HSN codes, and the correct CGST/SGST/IGST split on the document. This is worth settling before launch rather than after your first B2B customer asks for a proper invoice.
What's included
Concrete deliverables. Everything below is configured and tested before handover, not left as an exercise for you.
Built on an Online Store 2.0 theme so you can rearrange sections yourself afterwards without a developer. Product, collection, cart and checkout pages styled to your brand, with page weight kept low enough to load on a 4G connection outside a metro.
Razorpay, PayU or Cashfree integrated and tested end-to-end with live transactions, including refund flow. We handle the technical side of onboarding; the KYC and bank verification sit with you and typically take 3 to 7 working days.
Serviceability check on the product page, COD eligibility rules by order value and pincode, and partial-prepaid options where your category suffers from RTO. Configured against your actual courier partner's serviceable list.
Tax-invoice app configured with your GSTIN, HSN codes per product, and correct intra-state versus inter-state tax split. Invoices attach to the order confirmation automatically.
A deliberately short list — reviews, shipping aggregator, invoicing, and analytics. Every paid app is a recurring cost and a performance tax, so we justify each one against a specific job rather than installing a starter pack.
Shiprocket, Delhivery or your existing courier connected so labels, tracking, and status emails flow without manual work. Rate rules set by weight and zone.
Migration
Migrations fail on two things: product data and URLs. Product data is the boring half — variants, inventory, images, and the metafields that carry size charts or care instructions all need mapping before anything is imported, because fixing a bad import later is slower than doing it properly once.
URLs are the half that costs money if you skip it. Shopify enforces its own URL structure — /products/ and /collections/ — so almost every product and category address on your old store will change. Without a complete 301 redirect map from old address to new, you hand back the search rankings you spent years building. We build that map from a crawl of the live site before migration and verify every redirect resolves in a single hop after go-live.
Order and customer history can be imported so that returning customers keep their addresses and you keep your reporting continuity. Historical orders come across as records rather than as fulfillable orders — worth knowing before you promise your accounts team something Shopify cannot do.
How we work
Timelines assume product data and images arrive in the first week. Catalogue size is the main variable.
Catalogue audit, plan selection, gateway choice, and app stack decided and costed. If you are migrating, we crawl the existing store and produce the redirect map now.
Theme development, product import, collection structure, and content pages. You get a live preview link and review as it is built rather than at the end.
Gateway, COD rules, GST invoicing, shipping, and analytics all configured and tested with real transactions. Redirects staged.
Go-live, redirect verification, Search Console submission, and a handover session. Larger catalogues or delayed gateway KYC push this later.
Who this suits
It fits best for brands doing somewhere between their first order and roughly ₹5 crore a year, with a catalogue under a few thousand SKUs and a team that does not include a developer. The monthly platform fee buys you hosting, security patching, PCI compliance and uptime you would otherwise manage yourself — for most brands at that stage this is straightforwardly good value.
It suits categories where checkout is standard: apparel, beauty, food, accessories, home. It suits founders who will actually use the admin — adding products, running discounts, editing sections — rather than routing every change through an agency.
It fits badly where margins are thin enough that a per-order platform fee matters, where you need quotation-based B2B pricing per customer, or where your catalogue runs to tens of thousands of SKUs with complex filtering. For those, read the WooCommerce development page, or start from ecommerce website development where we compare all three routes on your numbers. A Shopify development company that never recommends anything else is not giving you advice, it is reading you its price list.
Transparent pricing
Fixed-price for the build. Shopify's own subscription and any paid apps are billed to you directly by those vendors and are not marked up by us.
All prices in INR, exclusive of GST. Shopify subscription (billed by Shopify, roughly ₹2,000–₹7,500 per month depending on plan — check current rates) and paid apps are separate.
Common questions
Budget three things. The build is a one-off from ₹34,999. Shopify's subscription is billed monthly by Shopify — roughly ₹2,000 on Basic up to around ₹7,500 on the mid plan, though you should check current rates. Paid apps typically add ₹1,500 to ₹4,000 a month for a lean stack. Gateway charges run around 2% per transaction and are deducted at settlement.
Three to four weeks for a starter catalogue, four to six for a full one. The two things that push it later are product data arriving late and payment gateway KYC, which sits with your bank and can take 3 to 7 working days on its own. We start gateway onboarding in week one specifically so it is not the thing holding up launch.
Yes, if the redirect map is done properly. Shopify forces its own URL structure, so nearly every product address changes. We crawl the existing store before migration, map every old address to its new one, and verify each redirect resolves in a single hop after go-live. Skipping this is the single most common reason a migration tanks organic traffic.
Yes. Shopify Payments is not available to Indian merchants, so checkout runs on Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree or CCAvenue. Note that Shopify applies its own platform fee on third-party gateways on lower plans, on top of the gateway's own charge. Confirm the current rate for your plan before committing, because it applies to every order.
Not natively. Shopify's order confirmation is not a compliant tax invoice. We configure an invoicing app with your GSTIN, HSN codes per product, and the correct CGST/SGST versus IGST split so a proper invoice attaches to every order automatically. Worth settling before launch rather than after a customer asks.
That is the point of building on an Online Store 2.0 theme. You can add products, change prices, run discounts, reorder homepage sections and edit content without touching code or calling us. Structural changes — new page types, custom logic — still need development. We run a handover session and you own every account.
Then say so on the call and we will not sell you one. If your margins cannot absorb a per-order platform fee, or you need per-customer B2B pricing, WooCommerce or a custom build is the better answer. The comparison we use to decide is on the ecommerce website development page.
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