WordPress vs Shopify in India (2026)

Shopify's Basic plan for Indian merchants is roughly ₹1,994 a month on a yearly bill, or about ₹2,420 month to month, as of October 2026. On top of that sit the domain, any paid theme, paid apps for reviews or GST invoicing, and the transaction fee Shopify adds when you use Razorpay or PhonePe instead of its own payments on lower tiers. A small Jaipur jewellery store doing twenty orders a day should budget ₹30,000 to ₹45,000 a year before gateway charges. Confirm on Shopify's India pricing page, because plan structures move.

WooCommerce is a free plugin on free software, so the fixed cost is the hosting. Indian shared hosting runs ₹149 to ₹299 a month on a long prepay, and a .in or .com domain is ₹699 to ₹999 a year after the first year. That is under ₹5,000 a year for the platform. The money goes elsewhere: a theme at ₹3,000 to ₹6,000, a paid shipping or invoicing plugin, and a freelancer at ₹1,500 to ₹5,000 a month if you do not want to touch updates. Our website cost guide breaks these line items down.

Both handle Indian payments, but differently. WooCommerce with the official Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree or PhonePe plugin gives you UPI, cards, net banking, wallets and EMI at checkout with no platform fee on top of the gateway's own charge. Cash on delivery is a built-in method you can restrict by pincode or order value with a small plugin. GST invoices with HSN codes and place-of-supply logic come from plugins such as the WooCommerce PDF invoice add-ons. Read our note on COD versus prepaid orders before deciding your rules.

Shopify's checkout is the best in the business, and Razorpay, PhonePe and Cashfree all publish Shopify apps that bring UPI to it. The friction is cost and control: lower plans add a transaction fee when you use these gateways, and COD and GST invoicing usually rely on paid apps because Shopify's core was built for prepaid card markets. For a catalogue of fifty products shipping across India, Shopify's inventory, fulfilment and abandoned-cart tools are still worth the extra money for most sellers.

Shopify hosts every store on its own global infrastructure with a CDN, so a shopper in Lucknow on a 4G connection gets product images from a nearby edge. You never think about servers, backups or traffic spikes during a Diwali sale, which is a real advantage for a small team. Theme choice and app bloat are the only speed variables you control, and the official free themes score well on Lighthouse.

WooCommerce speed is your responsibility and your opportunity. A LiteSpeed host with a Mumbai or Singapore data centre, a lightweight theme and object caching will outperform most hosted stores. A cheap plan with a heavy theme and twenty plugins will load in six seconds and lose sales. Run both candidates through our website speed test and plan for a caching plugin from day one.

Choose Shopify if products are the whole business, you will scale with Instagram and Google ads, you want checkout and fulfilment to just work, and the subscription is small next to your margins. Choose WooCommerce on WordPress if you want to own the store, keep fixed costs under ₹5,000 a year, mix content and commerce, or need specific Indian checkout logic without paying for apps.

If your store is really ten products next to a service business, neither may be the right size. The best website builder in India roundup covers lighter options, and the Shopify alternatives and WordPress alternatives pages rank each side in detail.