Shopify vs WooCommerce for an Indian store, decided on cost per order

Start here

The one number that decides it

Shopify charges a monthly subscription and, on lower plans, a platform fee on every order processed through a third-party gateway. WooCommerce charges neither — it is free software — but you now pay for hosting and, if you are honest about it, for somebody to keep the thing patched.

That difference compounds with volume in one direction and with neglect in the other. At low volume the subscription is trivial and the maintenance burden dominates, so Shopify wins comfortably. At high volume the per-order fee becomes a visible line in your P&L while hosting and maintenance have not changed, so WooCommerce wins comfortably.

The honest answer on where they cross is: it depends almost entirely on whether that third-party gateway fee applies to your plan. If it does, WooCommerce overtakes surprisingly early — in the low hundreds of orders a month. If it does not, Shopify stays cheaper far longer. That single question is worth confirming with Shopify before you commit to either platform, and the worked example below shows exactly how much it swings the answer.

Everything else here is either an input to that calculation or a reason to override it.

India-specific

Four differences that only matter here

Shopify Payments is not available to Indian merchants. Your checkout runs on Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree or CCAvenue on either platform — but on Shopify's lower plans a platform fee applies on top of the gateway's own charge for using a third-party gateway. Confirm the current rate for the plan you are considering, because it applies to every order for as long as you trade. On WooCommerce there is no equivalent fee.

GST invoicing is not native to either. Shopify's order confirmation is not a compliant tax invoice and needs an app; WooCommerce needs a plugin. Neither is difficult, both are usually forgotten until a B2B customer asks for a proper invoice with HSN codes and the correct CGST/SGST versus IGST split.

Cash on delivery needs building on both. Neither platform ships with pincode serviceability checking, COD eligibility by order value, or partial-prepaid options. In categories where return-to-origin is common this is not a nice-to-have — RTO is what quietly destroys margin on Indian D2C, and you pay shipping both ways on a sale that never happened.

Hosting reality differs sharply outside the metros. Shopify's infrastructure is somebody else's problem and performs consistently. A cheap Indian shared host running WooCommerce with a few thousand SKUs will be slow, and slow checkout loses orders — so the WooCommerce cost comparison must use realistic managed hosting, not the ₹200-a-month figure that makes it look free.

Side by side

The comparison, feature by feature

The two formulas

Where the money actually goes each month

Worked example

The same store, four sizes

Reading the model

What the table does and does not prove

The shape matters more than the exact figures. Shopify's cost curve rises with order volume because part of it is charged per order. WooCommerce's is close to flat, because hosting and maintenance do not care whether you took 100 orders or 1,000. Wherever your real numbers sit, those two curves cross somewhere, and finding roughly where is the entire decision.

Look at the last row of that table, because it is the important one. Remove the third-party gateway fee and Shopify goes from nearly twice the cost of WooCommerce to substantially cheaper, at identical volume. One fee flips the entire recommendation. This is why we will not tell you a single crossover number and why any article that does should be treated carefully — ask Shopify what rate applies to your plan and your chosen gateway, in writing, before you decide.

The model excludes two things deliberately. Payment gateway charges of around 2% apply on both platforms and cancel out. And the build cost is similar enough on either — we charge from ₹34,999 for both — that it does not move the comparison.

What the model cannot capture is the cost of neglect. A WooCommerce store nobody patches is not cheaper, it is a liability accruing quietly. If there is genuinely nobody who will own updates and nobody paying a maintenance retainer, add the risk to the WooCommerce column or pick Shopify — that is the honest reading.

It also cannot capture the value of not thinking about it. Founders under real time pressure often make more money by choosing the platform that demands less attention, even where the spreadsheet says otherwise.

Switching later

Migrating between them, and what it costs you

Migration in either direction is routine. Products, variants, customers and order history all export and import with reasonable fidelity, and the tedious part — mapping variants and metafields properly before importing anything — is work rather than risk.

The part that costs money if skipped is the URL redirect map. Each platform enforces its own address structure, so essentially every product and category URL changes on migration. Without a complete 301 redirect from each old address to its new one, you hand back the search rankings you spent years earning, and that is a far larger number than any platform fee.

The practical implication for this decision: choosing wrong is recoverable, and the recovery cost is a migration project rather than a catastrophe. That should lower the stakes of the choice. Pick for where you are now and the next eighteen months, not for a volume you hope to reach in year five.

Common questions

Questions about choosing