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 pricing in 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.
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.
What you get:
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.
What you get:
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.
What you get: (this is our base build at Growww Tech)
See our Shopify development service →
What you get:
Register via GoDaddy, Namecheap, or directly through Shopify.
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.
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:
≈ ₹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:
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.
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.
Variable. ₹50,000+/mo is the floor if you actually want results.
Our ₹50,000 base build includes:
Not included: Shopify subscription, domain, premium apps, product data entry.
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.
The pattern we see in Reddit threads and on the first call with new brands almost never changes:
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.
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.
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