Ecommerce & Shopify Development in India

Indian ecommerce build costs cluster into clear bands. A basic Shopify store on a stock theme typically costs ₹20,000 to ₹60,000 from a freelancer. Theme customisation with integrations from a small agency runs ₹50,000 to ₹1,50,000. A custom theme with bespoke UX, larger catalogues and system integrations sits between ₹1,50,000 and ₹5,00,000. Shopify Plus projects run ₹5 lakh to ₹15 lakh, and WooCommerce builds range ₹50,000 to ₹4,00,000 depending on how much custom development the plugins cannot cover.

Mediaverse Digital publishes three prices. Shopify Launch is ₹1,50,000 (about $3,000) and covers a customised premium theme, up to 100 products, payments, COD, shipping, GST invoicing, WhatsApp alerts, SEO basics and two weeks of training. Shopify Custom starts from ₹3,00,000 (about $6,000) for a custom Liquid theme, 500+ products, subscriptions or bundles and ERP, CRM or marketplace sync. Shopify Plus or headless starts from ₹8,00,000 (about $16,000) and is scoped line by line before you commit.

Budget for the running costs too, because a store is not a one-time purchase. Shopify's own plans start at a few thousand rupees per month and Shopify Plus is roughly ₹1.75 lakh per month paid directly to Shopify. Payment gateways charge about 2 percent per transaction, courier aggregators bill per shipment, and a typical app stack adds ₹3,000 to ₹15,000 per month. Maintenance from an agency, if you want it, runs ₹5,000 to ₹20,000 per month in India.

Shopify is the right default for most D2C brands in India. Checkout is reliable, hosting and security are handled, the app ecosystem covers Indian payments, COD and courier integrations, and a non-technical team can run the store. Its costs are the monthly plan, transaction fees if you use a third-party gateway, and app subscriptions that creep up if nobody prunes them. For a brand doing under a few crore a year, nothing else is worth the operational overhead.

WooCommerce makes sense when the business already runs on WordPress with a content-heavy site, when catalogue logic is unusual, or when the team wants full control of hosting and data at the cost of managing updates and security themselves. It is cheaper to license and more expensive to keep healthy. We build it when the reasons are real and steer clients away from it when the reason is only the missing monthly fee.

Headless, with a Shopify backend and a Next.js or Hydrogen storefront, is for brands where site speed, custom experiences or content-led selling justify a development team. It removes theme limits and can be very fast, but every feature that came free with a theme now has to be built and maintained. We recommend it above roughly ₹50 lakh in monthly revenue or when a specific experience cannot be built any other way.

Indian shoppers buy on their phones, often on patchy connections, and a large share still prefer cash on delivery. A store that loads in 6 seconds, hides the delivery estimate until checkout and asks for a state dropdown before a pin code is fighting its own customers. We build the product page around delivery date, price with offers applied, size or variant clarity, reviews and a sticky buy button, and we test it on a mid-range Android phone before launch.

COD is a margin question as much as a conversion one. Return-to-origin rates on unconfirmed COD orders are typically 20 to 40 percent in India. A WhatsApp confirmation message before dispatch, a small prepaid incentive and pin-code serviceability checks bring that down without turning COD off. These flows are part of every Launch build, not an add-on.

After launch, the store becomes the landing page for every Meta, Google and marketplace campaign, which is why tracking is configured with purchase events, Conversions API and a Merchant Center feed before the first ad runs. Delivery is remote across India from our Bangalore base, and for US, UK and UAE brands selling into India or building international stores on the USD rate card.