Pixel Street :: Shopify vs WooCommerce: Which Should an Indian Store Build On?

Shopify charges you a subscription and then takes a percentage of every sale you make through an Indian payment gateway, because Shopify Payments is not offered in India. WooCommerce takes nothing per sale, and bills you instead through hosting, extension licences and the person who keeps it patched. So the honest comparison is not free against paid. It is a cost that grows with your revenue against a cost that mostly does not.

Almost every Shopify versus WooCommerce comparison you will read was written for a merchant in Ohio. That is not a style complaint. It changes the answer, and it changes it by lakhs a year.

I run Pixel Street, a web design studio in Salt Lake, Kolkata. We design and build for brands like Coca-Cola, ITC and Marico, and platform questions land in my inbox most weeks. The usual format for this question is a scorecard: twelve criteria, a winner announced in each one, a shrug at the end. That format is worth nothing, because a scorecard that hands WooCommerce five wins and Shopify five wins tells you nothing about your store.

The short answer

Shopify charges you a subscription and then takes a percentage of every sale you make through an Indian payment gateway, because Shopify Payments is not offered in India. WooCommerce takes nothing per sale, and bills you instead through hosting, extension licences and the person who keeps it patched. So the honest comparison is not free against paid. It is a cost that grows with your revenue against a cost that mostly does not.

If nobody on your team can be trusted to apply a plugin update, buy Shopify and treat the percentage as the price of not having that job. If you are selling enough that a two percent platform fee has become a real line in your P&L, and you have or can retain someone technical, WooCommerce stops being the budget option and starts being the cheaper one. Everything below is the arithmetic behind that sentence.

The thing the American comparisons leave out

Both companies sell a first-party payment product. Shopify has Shopify Payments. Automattic has WooPayments. Both are the cheerful centre of every comparison article, and neither one is available to a merchant in India.

India does not appear on Shopify’s list of countries where Shopify Payments is offered, and it does not appear on WooCommerce’s list for WooPayments either, checked on both sites on 30 July 2026. An Indian store on either platform is using Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree or Stripe, and paying that gateway directly.

Here is where the two platforms stop being symmetrical. WooCommerce charges nothing for that arrangement. Shopify charges a fee on every order processed through a provider that is not Shopify Payments, and since an Indian merchant has no other option, that fee is permanent. It is not an edge case or a penalty for being awkward. It is the standing condition of running a Shopify store from India.

That is the single fact I would want a client to understand before anything else in this comparison, and it is the one that global listicles skip, because in their market it genuinely does not apply.

What Shopify costs in India

Shopify publishes its prices, which already puts it ahead of most enterprise software on honesty. These are the figures on Shopify’s India pricing page on 30 July 2026, in rupees, as an Indian merchant sees them. I am quoting INR rather than converting USD, because the conversion is where most Indian pricing articles quietly go wrong.

There is a three-day free trial and an introductory rate of ₹20 a month for the first three months. Shopify POS Pro is ₹7,000 a month per location on top, with twenty locations included on Plus. These are the same figures I published in my comparison of Shopify and Adobe Commerce, checked against the same page on the same day, because a studio that quotes two different prices for the same product in two different articles deserves to be ignored.

Now stack the fees. On Basic, Shopify takes 2% of every order for the crime of using an outside gateway. Razorpay charges a 2% platform fee on domestic cards, netbanking and wallets, applies the same 2% to UPI and RuPay debit even though those are zero-MDR instruments, adds 18% GST on its fee, and goes up to 3% on international cards. On a month of ₹10,00,000 in sales that is roughly ₹20,000 to Shopify, ₹20,000 to Razorpay and ₹3,600 of GST on Razorpay’s cut. About ₹43,600 in transaction costs, against a plan fee of ₹1,499.

The subscription was never the expensive part. Anyone comparing these platforms on monthly plan price is comparing the wrong column.

Pick your Shopify plan with a calculator, not a feature list

Because the fee falls as the subscription rises, every upgrade has a break-even point in monthly sales. Shopify will not work this out for you on the pricing page, so here it is, on annual billing.

• Basic to Grow costs about ₹4,100 more a month and cuts the fee by one percentage point. It pays for itself above roughly ₹4,10,000 of monthly sales.
• Grow to Advanced costs about ₹17,100 more a month and cuts the fee by 0.4 points. It pays above roughly ₹42,70,000 a month.
• Basic straight to Advanced costs about ₹21,200 more a month and cuts the fee by 1.4 points. It pays above roughly ₹15,10,000 a month.

Those are my numbers, derived from Shopify’s published prices and fees. Run them against your own average monthly revenue before a salesperson runs them for you.

What WooCommerce actually costs, which is not nothing

WooCommerce is free and it is genuinely free. Its own pricing page states a $0 platform fee, no monthly subscription and a 0% revenue share, and the plugin has been open source since it first shipped in 2011. It is an Automattic product and has been since Automattic acquired WooThemes in 2015, so “a plugin maintained by a small team” has not been an accurate description for over a decade. On WordPress.org the listing reports 7+ million active installations, currently on version 10.9.4.

Free software still sends you a bill. WooCommerce is unusually candid about this, and puts the numbers on its own pricing page: hosting at “$25 – $350/month for most stores”, and extensions at “$29 – $299/year per extension”. For an Indian store, the marketplace prices in rupees, and these are the real annual licence figures on 30 July 2026.

Read that table the way a merchant reads it. If your store needs subscriptions, memberships and a gift card programme, you are already past ₹50,000 a year in licences before hosting, before a theme, before anyone has written a line of code. Anybody who tells you WooCommerce is free is describing the download, not the store.

The hosting line deserves the same scepticism in reverse. WooCommerce quotes $25 to $350 a month and I am deliberately not converting it, because the exchange rate moves and I would rather you priced it locally. What I will say is that a shared plan at the bottom of that range will not carry a catalogue with traffic on it, and that where the server physically sits is a latency question with a rupee value in India. I keep a current list of hosting services in India for exactly this reason.

And then the line nobody quotes: somebody has to own updates. WooCommerce inherits the entire WordPress dependency surface, which is a real and well-documented security obligation rather than a theoretical one. If that obligation is unowned, the saving is imaginary. I have set out the wider version of this argument in WordPress versus a PHP framework, and the practical version in our guide to vulnerability assessment and penetration testing.

The shape of the two bills

Put the two cost structures side by side and the decision stops being about features.

Shopify’s cost is small at the start and grows with every order. At ₹10,00,000 a month on Basic, Shopify’s surcharge alone is ₹2,40,000 a year, and that is before Razorpay and before GST. Double your sales and that line doubles. It is a tax on success, charged for a service — Shopify Payments — that you are not permitted to use.

WooCommerce’s cost is larger at the start and mostly flat afterwards. Hosting scales with traffic, not revenue. Licences renew at the same price whether you sell ten orders or ten thousand. A developer costs what a developer costs. That is why the two lines cross, and why the answer genuinely changes as a store grows rather than being a matter of taste.

[IMG: Shopify starts cheap and rises with every order, because it charges 2% on Basic down to 0.2% on Plus for any payment provider other than Shopify Payments, which is not offered in India. WooCommerce starts higher and stays flat, taking no cut of sales. The two lines cross, and the axes carry no numbers because where they cross depends on your own volume.]

Where the two platforms actually differ

This is the part that usually gets run as twelve rounds with a bell. Here is the same information without the theatre, and without pretending the categories weigh the same.

Notice there is no winner column. The standard version has one for every row, and it produces a five-all draw, which is what happens when you weight “marketing tools” the same as “who pays for the outage”.

On the SEO argument, which I am less impressed by than I used to be

Comparisons routinely hand SEO to WooCommerce because WordPress allows deeper control over URLs, templates and metadata. That is still true and it matters much less than it did. Both platforms produce crawlable, editable, indexable pages. What decides whether a product page gets found now is whether it says something a machine can attribute to you: real specifications, real sizing, real answers to the question a buyer actually typed, rather than the manufacturer’s description that forty other retailers pasted in on the same afternoon.

I sell SEO work, so read that with the appropriate suspicion. I would still rather tell you that platform choice is a minor SEO variable than sell you a migration on a premise I do not believe. If you want the platform-agnostic version, it is in our comparison of the major CMS platforms.

Apps, extensions and one correction

Shopify’s about page claims 13,000+ apps in the App Store. Comparison articles still print 3,200, which tells you roughly how old those sentences are. WooCommerce’s marketplace plus the WordPress plugin directory is larger still. Neither number should decide anything, because “does an app exist” is almost never the constraint. The constraint is that Shopify apps bill monthly and quietly become a second subscription worth auditing, while WooCommerce extensions are code you install and then own the consequences of at every update.

One straight correction. Comparison posts still recommend Oberlo for dropshipping. Shopify shut Oberlo down, with the last day of access on 15 June 2022 and DSers named as the migration partner. Recommending it in 2026 is the kind of detail that tells you how much of a comparison article was actually re-checked.

What a vendor comparison page is worth

This graphic comes from Shopify’s own page comparing itself to WooCommerce. I read it as a useful artefact rather than as useful evidence.

[IMG: Key Features of Shopify & Woocommerce]

Source: www.shopify.com

A comparison table published by one of the two products exists to be won by that product. Read it to learn what Shopify thinks its strengths are, which is genuinely informative, and then go and check the claims somewhere Shopify does not control.

How big each one actually is

Size figures are the most copied and least sourced numbers in this comparison, so here they are with sources and dates attached.

Three notes on that table, because a number without a caveat is half a lie.

The GMV figure is one quarter, not a year. Shopify reported it on 5 May 2026 for the quarter ended 31 March 2026, alongside revenue of $3,170 million. Comparison articles routinely quote a full-year 2020 figure with nothing attached to it, and I have not tried to reconcile the two, because comparing a quarter to a year nobody can source is how the error spreads in the first place. Shopify’s Q2 2026 results were not yet published when I checked.

The market share figures come from W3Techs, which I use because it publishes its methodology and says what it excludes: subdomains are counted with their parent domain, redirected domains are left out, and the universe is described as “the relevant web”, meaning sites with meaningful content, rather than every registered domain. Read it as a share of sites people visit. The old “30.3% of the top one million eCommerce sites” line is gone because the post never said who counted, how, or when.

The WooCommerce install count is downloads-and-activations, not stores taking money. Some of those seven million are staging copies, abandoned experiments and sites that installed the plugin and never sold anything. Shopify’s number is merchants paying a subscription. They are not the same kind of number and anyone stacking them in a single bar chart is misleading you.

Switching from one to the other

Both directions are possible and neither is cheap. Products, customers and order history move with migration tools. What does not move is the front end, the app or extension data, the integrations you forgot were load-bearing, and the search rankings attached to your existing URL structure.

Draw the redirect map before you touch anything else. That is the step people skip and then spend two quarters recovering from, and it is the only part of a replatform that gets harder the longer you leave it.

I have written before about rented land. I lost two companies before Pixel Street, and the lesson that survived both failures is simple: never build your main asset on ground someone else controls. A Shopify store is a lease. That can be an entirely rational thing to sign, and I would sign it for plenty of businesses, but sign it knowing what it is. Keep your product data, your customer list and your content exportable, and the lease stays a choice instead of a trap.

So which one

If you are weighing the enterprise end of this instead, the comparison shifts again, and I have set it out in Shopify versus Adobe Commerce. And if what you are really trying to price is the build rather than the platform, our breakdown of what web design costs in Kolkata is more useful than any global average.

Questions I get asked

Is WooCommerce really free?

The plugin is. The store is not. WooCommerce’s own pricing page puts hosting at $25 to $350 a month and extensions at $29 to $299 a year each, and in rupees a single extension like WooCommerce Subscriptions is ₹26,780 a year. Add a theme, a developer and somebody to apply updates. Free describes the licence, not the project.

Does Shopify charge transaction fees in India?

Yes, and there is no way around it. Shopify charges 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus for orders processed through a payment provider other than Shopify Payments, and Shopify Payments is not offered in India. That fee sits on top of whatever Razorpay, PayU or Cashfree charges you, and on top of GST on the gateway’s fee.

Which is cheaper overall?

It depends entirely on volume, which is why the question is usually asked wrong. Shopify is cheaper to start and its cost climbs with your revenue. WooCommerce costs more up front and then stops climbing. A store doing a lakh a month will find Shopify cheaper. A store doing thirty lakh a month, with someone technical already on the payroll, will usually find WooCommerce cheaper. Work out your own numbers rather than borrowing anyone’s conclusion, mine included.

Is WooCommerce secure enough for a real business?

Yes, if updates have an owner with a name. The risk in a WordPress store is almost never core; it is the plugin and extension surface, and it is a maintenance problem rather than a verdict on the platform. If nobody is accountable for applying patches on a schedule, that is an argument for a hosted platform, not an argument about WooCommerce.

Can I move from one to the other later?

Yes, in both directions, and it always costs more than the migration tool suggests. Data moves. Design, integrations, extension data and your URL structure do not. Plan the redirects first.

WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin. Should I be comparing it to Shopify at all?

Fair challenge, and yes. You are not really comparing a plugin to a platform, you are comparing two complete arrangements: one where a vendor owns the stack and charges a percentage, and one where you own the stack and carry the maintenance. That framing survives the category difference perfectly well.

What I would tell you across a table

Most people ask me this question hoping for a winner. The useful version has two parts, and neither is about features.

First, name the person who will run the store on a Tuesday afternoon. If they are not technical and cannot wait for someone who is, that decision has already been made for you and the rest of the comparison is decoration.

Second, write down your monthly sales and multiply by the fee. If the answer is a number you would not approve as a line item in any other context, it deserves the same scrutiny here.

Get those two right and either platform will serve you. Get them wrong and no amount of theme shopping will fix it. Our eCommerce team at Pixel Street works with both, and the first question on any platform call is who is going to run the thing, not which logo goes on the invoice.