How Much Does a Shopify Store Cost in India in 2026?
The honest answer almost nobody gives you upfront: ₹50,000 to ₹3,00,000+, and the spread is real. We’ve built 200+ Shopify stores for Indian D2C brands. The price doesn’t move randomly — it tracks three things: who builds it, what gets wired up, and how much the post-launch silence is going to cost you.
Most agencies bury the number. Freelancers lowball it. We’re going to walk through the entire cost stack — Shopify subscription, build options, payment gateway, Shiprocket, apps — so by the end of this page you can plug numbers into your own spreadsheet and stop guessing.
Quick Answer: ₹50,000 base for a fixed-price agency build. Custom design pushes it to ₹1,50,000+. A serious Shopify Plus migration is ₹3,00,000+. Below is the breakdown.
Shopify Subscription Plans (India · 2026)
Shopify India runs two billing tracks. Pay yearly costs roughly 25% less per month than pay monthly — same plan, same features, paid upfront for the year.
| Plan | Pay monthly | Pay yearly | 3rd-party fee | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | ₹1,994/mo | ₹1,499/mo | 2% | Solo founder, first store · ₹0–30L/mo |
| Grow | ₹7,447/mo | ₹5,599/mo | 1% | Scaling D2C · ₹30L–3Cr/mo |
| Advanced | ₹30,164/mo | ₹22,680/mo | 0.6% | ₹3Cr–20Cr/mo · multi-market |
| Shopify Plus | from ₹1,75,000/mo | from ₹1,75,000/mo (3-year term) | 0.2% | ₹20Cr+/mo · headless / B2B |
Prices snapshotted from shopify.com/in/pricing on 27 April 2026. Shopify pushes a price change once or twice a year — re-check before you commit.
Heads up — the “Shopify” tier was renamed Grow. If you read older guides referring to the ₹7,447/mo plan as “Shopify”, it’s the same plan, new label.
Our recommendation: Start on Basic with annual billing — ₹1,499/mo is the cheapest legitimate way onto Shopify India. Upgrade to Grow when you cross ₹10L/month and need a second team login. Don’t pay for Advanced unless your reporting workflow actually needs the deeper exports — most brands at ₹50L/month still don’t.
Why every Indian Shopify merchant pays the 3rd-party fee
The “3rd-party fee” column above is doing more work than the pricing page lets on. Shopify Payments — Shopify’s own gateway, which would let you skip that fee — is live in 40+ countries. India isn’t one of them as of April 2026. The blocker isn’t Shopify’s appetite; it’s the RBI compliance stack (recurring payments, KYC, domestic-processing mandate) that Stripe — which powers Shopify Payments — is still working through. There’s no public launch timeline (Shopify community thread).
Net effect: every Indian merchant uses a third-party gateway (alphabetically — Cashfree Payments, Easebuzz, PhonePe, Razorpay), and every Indian merchant pays the third-party fee on every order, on every plan. A ₹50L/month brand on Basic loses ₹1L/month to that fee alone, separately from what the gateway itself charges. Run your own numbers in the calculator.
Development Costs Breakdown
Option 1: DIY / Template Setup (₹0 – ₹20,000)
What you get:
- Free Shopify theme (Dawn, Sense, etc.)
- Basic customization yourself
- No professional design
Hidden cost: Your time. The DIY route eats 60–120 hours of founder weekends in week 1. Most brands rebuild within 6 months when conversion stays flat — that rebuild costs ₹50K+, on top of the lost weekends.
Option 2: Freelancer (₹15,000 – ₹50,000)
What you get:
- Theme customization
- Basic pages setup
- Limited revisions
Watch out for: No post-launch support contract, inconsistent QA, and freelancers who haven’t wired Razorpay or Shiprocket end-to-end before. The “₹15,000 store” usually skips GST configuration, COD verification, and the WhatsApp auto-replies — which means your team rebuilds those manually for the first three months.
Option 3: Professional Agency (₹50,000 – ₹1,50,000)
What you get: (this is our base build at Growww Tech)
- Built on the Growww Tech custom theme — built in-house, conversion-tuned for Indian D2C, customised to your brand
- Complete store setup with all pages
- Payment gateway integration (Cashfree Payments, Easebuzz, PhonePe, or Razorpay — picked by vendor response rate, not affiliation)
- Shiprocket / Delhivery shipping setup
- WhatsApp automation integration
- GST configuration & legal compliance
- Mobile optimization & Core Web Vitals
- Post-launch bug fixes for the lifetime of the store — no AMC, ever
- Training session on store management
See our Shopify development service →
Option 4: Custom Design + Development (₹1,50,000 – ₹3,00,000+)
What you get:
- Custom UI/UX design via Figma
- Unique brand experience
- Custom features and integrations
- Ideal for established brands with specific requirements
Additional Costs to Budget For
Domain (₹500 – ₹1,500/year)
Register via GoDaddy, Namecheap, or directly through Shopify.
Premium Theme (₹0 – ₹20,000 one-time)
Free themes (Dawn, Sense) work for most brands at launch. Premium themes (Impulse, Prestige, Motion) earn their price only when your AOV is high enough that a 2–3% conversion lift pays back the licence in week one.
Essential Apps (₹2,000 – ₹15,000/month)
- WhatsApp automation (Wato / Interakt): ₹2,000–₹8,000/mo
- Email marketing (Klaviyo): ₹0–₹5,000/mo
- Reviews (Judge.me): ₹0–₹1,500/mo
- SEO apps: ₹0–₹2,000/mo
Payment gateway costs — the part Shopify leaves off the pricing page
You’re picking from four mainstream Indian gateways. Headline rates from each vendor’s public pricing page:
| Gateway | UPI | Domestic cards | International cards | GST |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cashfree Payments | 1.95% | 1.95% | 2.99% Visa / MC · 2.95% Amex | + 18% |
| Easebuzz | 0.20% (<₹2K) · 0.60% (>₹2K) | 1.88% credit · 1.70% netbanking | not published | + 18% |
| PhonePe PG | ~2% standard · zero on current new-merchant promo | ~2% | not published | + 18% |
| Razorpay | 2% | 2% | ~3% | + 18% |
Cashfree Payments and PhonePe both run promotional rates for new merchants — both are temporary. Always read the gateway’s own pricing page before you forecast against a rate; we’ve seen brands underwrite a P&L on a launch promo and discover the real number in month 13.
We pick gateways for our clients based on vendor response rate when something breaks — not on the headline number, not on affiliation. The right pick depends on your transaction mix and the specific failures you can’t tolerate. UPI-heavy and price-sensitive? Easebuzz comes out cheapest. Selling internationally? Cashfree Payments publishes the most transparent intl rates. Want a known-good Shopify integration that just works? Razorpay’s the boring default. The calculator handles all four.
Worked example. ₹50L/month brand on Basic plan, all volume at the 2% standard gateway rate:
- Gateway fee: ₹50L × 2% = ₹1,00,000
- GST on the gateway fee: ₹1,00,000 × 18% = ₹18,000
- Shopify’s third-party fee: ₹50L × 2% = ₹1,00,000
≈ ₹2.18L/month in payment costs alone, before plan, COD, or shipping. That’s ~4.4% of revenue — before you’ve shipped a single box.
Try it with your own numbers — AOV, order count, COD share, RTO percentage, gateway mix. The calculator below is the same one we use internally:
GST on platform fees — read this before you forecast
Every fee above — gateway, plan, Shopify’s 3rd-party fee — is billed with 18% GST on top. If your brand is GST-registered, you claim Input Tax Credit and the GST nets to zero on your P&L (cash flow hit only — you pay it monthly, recover it in the next return cycle). If you’re below the GST threshold and not registered, GST is real out-of-pocket — your effective Razorpay rate is 2.36%, not 2%, and your effective Basic plan price is ₹1,769/mo on annual billing rather than ₹1,499.
Shiprocket & logistics
Per-shipment, not a flat monthly fee. Forward shipping starts at ₹20–₹26 per 500g (Professional plan vs Lite plan, base zone, per shiprocket.in/pricing). Heavier packages and out-of-zone destinations push it higher. RTO return charges are billed separately from forward — every package that comes back pays both legs.
RTO is the line item where most D2C founders are flying blind. Tier-2-heavy COD brands run 20–30% RTO; prepaid-only stores stay under 8%. The difference is real money — at ₹50L/month that’s ₹40K–₹80K/mo in pure return-shipping cost. Run your category’s RTO % through the calculator and see where the money actually goes.
Meta Ads
Variable. ₹50,000+/mo is the floor if you actually want results.
What’s Included in Growww Tech’s Base Package
Our ₹50,000 base build includes:
- ✓ Complete store development (4-week launch)
- ✓ Payment gateway integration
- ✓ Shiprocket / Delhivery shipping
- ✓ WhatsApp automation setup
- ✓ GST & legal compliance
- ✓ Mobile optimization
- ✓ Post-launch bug fixes — no AMC, ever
- ✓ Training session
Not included: Shopify subscription, domain, premium apps, product data entry.
What “No AMC” actually means
Most agencies sell you a build, then bill you ₹15K–₹50K every year as an annual maintenance contract just to keep the store running. We don’t. The ₹50,000 base build doesn’t carry a recurring fee. If something we shipped breaks — checkout, payment gateway integration, theme component, app integration we set up — we fix it, no clock running, for as long as the store is live. That’s how we stay long-term partners with 200+ Indian D2C brands instead of vendors with annual invoices.
What does cost extra? Active growth work — new features, store redesigns, performance marketing, conversion optimisation. That sits on a Growth Retainer (₹30K/mo, optional, cancel any time). The line is clean: maintenance is free, growth is paid.
Why Brands Choose Us Over Freelancers
The pattern we see in Reddit threads and on the first call with new brands almost never changes:
- “Freelancer disappeared after payment”
- “Store works but no one on the team knows how to update it”
- “Razorpay integration took 2 months”
- “Mobile site is broken, they say it’s extra cost to fix”
None of those are talent problems. They’re structural: a freelancer has no support contract, no QA second pair of eyes, and no continuity when the next gig pulls them away. We built around it. 200+ brands launched. ₹385Cr+ revenue processed through stores we’ve shipped. 4.5x average ROI. 98% retention. The receipts are on the success-stories page.
Get a real quote in 30 minutes
Every brand has different inputs — product count, AOV, COD percentage, target launch date, design ambition. The fastest way to get a number you can actually plan against is a 30-minute call. No sales pitch. We diagnose where you are, scope the build, and you walk away with a fixed-price quote whether you hire us or not.
Start a WhatsApp chat: Message the Growww Tech team on WhatsApp →
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