Key takeaways
- A starter Shopify or WooCommerce store in India realistically lands between 40,000 and 1.5 lakh rupees, not the 8,000 rupees a marketplace listing promises.
- A custom or headless build starts around 4 lakh and is only worth it above roughly 500 orders a month or with unusual catalogue logic.
- Running costs — hosting, payment gateway fees of about 2 percent, apps and maintenance — usually total 30,000 to 1.5 lakh rupees a year and decide long-term profitability.
- Payment gateway, GST-compliant invoicing and shipping integration are the three line items most cheap quotes silently exclude.
- Own your domain, hosting and source code from day one, whoever builds the store.
Two agencies read the same brief for an online store — around 200 products, payment gateway, delivery tracking — and come back a lakh apart. Neither is necessarily cheating. They are pricing different things, and the brief did not say which.
This guide breaks down the real ecommerce website development cost in India in 2026: what moves the number, what each platform charges, and which bills arrive after launch.
What changes the price#
Four things move an ecommerce quote more than anything else.
Catalogue size and complexity comes first. Fifty products with one photo each is a different job from 2,000 products with variants in size, colour and material, each with its own stock count and price. Variant logic is where ecommerce projects quietly expand.
Platform choice is second. A hosted platform absorbs a lot of engineering you would otherwise pay for. A custom build gives you control you may not need yet.
Integrations are third. Payment gateway, shipping partner, GST-compliant invoicing, an accounting tool, maybe a warehouse system. Each is a real piece of work, and each is a place where cheap quotes go quiet.
Design is fourth. A configured theme with your brand colours is a few days. A designed-from-scratch storefront with custom product pages and motion is a few weeks.
Realistic price bands in 2026#
A starter store — a solid theme, up to about a hundred products, payment gateway, shipping integration, basic pages — lands between 40,000 and 1.5 lakh rupees in India. This covers the majority of first stores for small retailers and D2C brands.
A mid-sized store, with custom design, larger catalogues, discount and loyalty logic, multi-language or multi-currency support, runs from 1.5 lakh to about 4 lakh.
A custom or headless build — your own backend, a decoupled storefront, ERP integration, unusual business rules — starts near 4 lakh and climbs from there depending on how much of the commerce engine you are writing yourself.
Below roughly 15,000 rupees you are buying a template installation. The store will exist, and it will look fine in a screenshot, but the integration and configuration work that makes it actually sell is not in that number.
If you are also weighing a companion app, the same logic applies there, and our guide to mobile app development cost in India breaks those bands down the same way.
Shopify, WooCommerce, or custom#
Shopify costs more per month and less per headache. Hosting, security patches and platform updates are someone else's problem. The tradeoff is a monthly subscription, transaction fees unless you use their preferred gateway, and paid apps that accumulate faster than owners expect.
WooCommerce has no licence fee. You pay for hosting, plugins and the developer who keeps it healthy. It is genuinely cheaper for a business that already has technical support available, and genuinely more expensive for one that does not, because a neglected WooCommerce store degrades — plugin conflicts, slow queries, security patches missed.
A custom build is justified by constraints, not ambition. If your pricing depends on customer group, order history and negotiated contracts at once, or your catalogue has rules no platform models well, custom earns its cost. If the honest reason is that custom sounds more serious, it will cost three times as much and launch six months later.
Over three years, the total cost of Shopify and WooCommerce for a comparable small store usually converges. Choose on who will maintain it, not on the opening price.
The costs quotes leave out#
Payment gateway charges are the big one. Most Indian gateways take roughly 2 percent per transaction, with UPI often cheaper and cards and international payments dearer. On 10 lakh rupees of monthly sales that is around 20,000 rupees a month — larger than most maintenance retainers, and it never stops.
Hosting for a WooCommerce store that actually performs is not the 200 rupees a month shared plan. Budget several thousand rupees a month once you have real traffic and real cart activity.
Then the smaller recurring items: domain renewal, SSL, paid plugins or apps, transactional email and SMS credits, and a maintenance retainer. Together these typically come to between 30,000 and 1.5 lakh rupees a year for a small to mid-sized store.
Finally, content. Product photography, descriptions and category copy are a real cost, usually borne by the business rather than the agency, and usually underestimated.
Timeline#
A starter store takes two to four weeks if your product data and images are ready. They rarely are, and waiting on catalogue content is the single most common reason an ecommerce launch slips.
A mid-sized store takes six to ten weeks. A custom or headless build takes four to six months before the first real order.
Questions to ask before you sign#
Ask who owns the domain, the hosting account and the source code. The answer should be you, in writing, whoever builds the site. The same test applies to any agency, which is why our guide on choosing a website design company leads with it.
Ask which payment gateway is included and who bears the onboarding paperwork. Ask whether invoices generated by the store are GST compliant out of the box. Ask what happens to the catalogue if you later change platforms — can product data be exported cleanly?
Ask what the maintenance arrangement is after launch, what it costs, and what response time it promises. A store that is down on a Saturday evening is losing money in a way a brochure site never does.
Finally ask to see two stores the agency built that are still live and still trading a year later. That single question filters more effectively than any portfolio page.
Where to start#
If you are selling under a few hundred orders a month, start on a standard platform, spend the saved budget on photography and advertising, and let demand tell you which custom features you actually need. Most stores that fail do not fail from missing features. They fail from an empty catalogue and no traffic.
If you want a costed breakdown for your own catalogue and integrations, Larwell Technologies builds and maintains ecommerce stores for businesses across India, and a written scope beats a verbal estimate every time.
