How Much Does an E-commerce Website Cost in 2026?

Every online store you've ever bought from runs on one of three architectures: a hosted platform (Shopify being the one that matters), an open-source store you operate yourself (WooCommerce on WordPress, overwhelmingly), or software built for that business. The build quote is only the entry ticket — the real comparison is the shape of the total cost over two or three years.

The table below is the honest version of that comparison, with India pricing as of August 2026. Note what it doesn't say: that any column is "best." Each one is genuinely right for a different business, which is the entire point of the sections that follow.

Let's put real numbers on the recurring layer, because this is where store budgets quietly drift. Shopify's India pricing starts at ₹1,499 a month for Basic on annual billing (about ₹1,994 if you pay monthly), and 18% GST applies on top of the subscription. Basic also takes a transaction fee of around 2% — and that is before any payment gateway's own charges. Practitioner estimates of a realistic all-in monthly Shopify spend — subscription, GST, apps, and fees — commonly land in the ₹6,000–15,000 range for a small store, which is worth knowing before the ₹1,499 headline anchors your budget.

Payment gateway fees apply on every route, including a custom build, because they are the cost of moving money. Razorpay's standard plan — the default for Indian stores — charges 2% + GST per successful transaction, with no setup fee or annual maintenance. One nuance worth knowing: on standard bank-to-bank UPI the regulated MDR is actually zero, but gateways still apply their platform fee, so budget the 2% across methods and treat anything better as upside. High-volume merchants (consistently ₹5–10 lakh+ monthly) can negotiate custom rates — worth doing the moment you qualify.

Now the arithmetic that decides the Shopify-vs-custom question over time. At ₹2 lakh of monthly sales, Shopify Basic's ~2% platform cut is ₹4,000 a month on top of the subscription — call it ₹70,000+ a year, growing with every sale, before gateway fees. Against a one-time custom build at ₹1.5–2.5 lakh with no platform cut, the crossover arrives surprisingly early for a store that's actually selling. That is not an argument against Shopify — paying a percentage is exactly right while revenue is small and uncertain. It is an argument for re-running this arithmetic once revenue is neither.

Whichever architecture you pick, the same handful of factors move the build cost — and most of them are about your catalogue and operations, not the technology. This is why two stores on the same platform can cost five times apart.

Shopify is the right answer more often than a custom-build agency should admit, so let's admit it. If you are validating whether anyone will buy, launching a standard retail catalogue, or running a small store where predictable monthly cost beats everything else — use Shopify. It compresses time-to-first-sale like nothing else, the operational load is genuinely handled for you, and the app ecosystem covers most standard needs. We have built Shopify stores for clients and will again; for the right shape of business it is simply correct.

It stops being right in two situations, and they arrive quietly. The first is scale arithmetic: as revenue grows, the percentage-shaped costs — platform cut, app subscriptions that creep to solve each new need, the plan upgrades — compound into a number that would have funded owning the store outright. The second is the custom-flow wall: the moment your selling model isn't standard retail (B2B pricing tiers, unusual checkout logic, deep integration with your own systems), you are fighting the platform's assumptions with apps and workarounds, and each workaround adds monthly cost and fragility.

The honest test mirrors the one from WordPress vs custom: is the store a channel for your business, or becoming the business itself? A channel rents infrastructure happily. A business that lives on its store — where checkout conversion, page speed, and custom flows are the competitive edge — eventually wants to own the machine. The good news is the migration path is well-trodden; the better news is that knowing the crossover exists lets you plan it instead of discovering it.

WooCommerce deserves its own honest paragraph because "free" is doing a lot of work in its pitch. The software costs nothing and there is no platform transaction cut — genuinely valuable. What you take on instead is everything Shopify's fee was buying: hosting sized for a database-backed store, plugin licences (the good commerce plugins are paid), updates, backups, and security patching on a deadline.

That last one is not hypothetical. A WooCommerce store is a WordPress site with more plugins and higher stakes — it holds customer data and takes payments. The security picture we documented in WordPress vs custom applies with interest: the ecosystem logged 11,334 new vulnerabilities in 2025, 91% of them in plugins, and a commerce site is a more attractive target than a brochure. Run it lean and patched, and it is a fine, economical platform; run it as "set up once and forget", and it is a breach with a countdown.

WooCommerce fits best where WordPress already fits: a content-led business adding a modest shop, a team with someone genuinely responsible for maintenance, standard retail needs, and cost sensitivity about monthly fees. If that's you, it is a legitimate answer — go in with eyes open about whose job the running of it is.

A custom build stops being the expensive option the moment the store has to do something platforms don't — or has to stop paying a percentage on everything forever. In our custom-application band (about $3,000–$6,000 / ₹1.5–2.5 lakh for a focused build, scoped fixed, more for heavy catalogues), you get a store that is exactly your flows: your checkout, your pricing logic, your integrations, on the same boring-proven stack as everything we build — which is precisely what makes it maintainable for whoever runs it after us.

The clearest custom cases we see: B2B commerce (price lists per customer, credit terms, bulk flows — platforms fight you on all of it), stores that must integrate deeply with existing systems (your ERP, your inventory, your logistics), businesses where the percentage arithmetic has tipped, and anyone whose checkout or catalogue is genuinely non-standard. Performance-critical retail belongs here too: a custom store ships as fast, prerendered pages by default — the difference between a product page that loads instantly on a phone and one that loses the 53% of mobile visitors who abandon slow pages.

One honest boundary: a multi-vendor marketplace — many sellers, commissions, payouts, seller dashboards — is not a bigger store, it is a platform, with tenancy and payout logic closer to SaaS engineering than retail. We build those too (our own product portfolio includes marketplace builds), but budget and plan for it as a platform: that discussion lives in the custom SaaS guide. And whichever route you take, the practicalities of who builds it, on what quote, with what ownership are the same as any web project — the cost guide and brief guide apply unchanged.

Whichever route you choose, an online store is an operation, not an artefact. The recurring layer beyond platform and gateway fees is where first-time store owners get surprised, so here is the list to budget against from day one.

On the platform side: apps and plugins accumulate (each solving one need for a few hundred to a few thousand rupees monthly), themes get replaced, and plan tiers rise with your feature needs. On the operational side: shipping partner fees, the genuine cost of returns and COD reconciliation, product photography for every new line, and the marketing that actually brings visitors — a store with no traffic budget is a warehouse with a padlock. And on every route, the maintenance floor we describe in the website cost guide applies with higher stakes, because downtime on a store is measured in lost orders, not inconvenience.

The planning heuristic we give clients: whatever your build budget, expect the first year's running costs — platform, gateway, apps, shipping, and a realistic marketing floor — to be of the same order as the build. A store budgeted only to launch is budgeted to stall.

Here is the decision compressed to three questions. One: is revenue proven? If not, Shopify — validate on rented infrastructure, cheaply and this month. Two: is your selling model standard retail? If yes and revenue is modest, stay on a platform (Shopify for handled-for-you, WooCommerce if you have a maintainer and fee sensitivity). Three: has either the percentage arithmetic tipped or the custom-flow wall arrived? Then a custom build stops being a cost and becomes the cheaper option with a longer horizon — and you'll know, because you'll be paying for workarounds monthly.

What we bring to that conversation is that we sit on both sides of it: we have delivered Shopify builds for clients and we build commerce software — including marketplace platforms of our own — so the recommendation is grounded in having operated both shapes, not in what we happen to sell. If the right answer is a ₹40,000 themed Shopify store, that is the answer you will get, along with an honest account of the fee arithmetic you are signing up for.

And if it is a custom build, it comes the way everything we ship comes: a free scoping call, a fixed written quote against a written scope, live staging from week one, and 100% ownership — code, data, accounts — from day one. The timeline mechanics are the same as any web project (see how long a website takes), with catalogue data entry and product content as the additional critical-path items to plan for.