There is no winner. There is a crossover point, and three questions that decide which side of it you are on: how much you sell a month, how awkward your catalogue is, and who is going to maintain the thing on a Tuesday afternoon in eighteen months.
But before any of that, one India-specific fact reshapes the whole comparison, and most comparison posts written for a US audience miss it entirely.
Why the India answer is different
Shopify Payments is available in 41 countries and regions. India is not one of them. Shopify's own documentation is explicit that businesses in unlisted countries have to use a third-party payment provider instead.
That matters because Shopify charges a third-party transaction fee on orders it does not process itself — and since it cannot process yours, you pay that fee on essentially every card, UPI and netbanking order you take. On Shopify's own India pricing page, the fee is listed per plan:
| Plan | Monthly billing | Annual billing (per month) | Third-party transaction fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | ₹1,994 | ₹1,499 | 2% |
| Grow | ₹7,447 | ₹5,599 | 1% |
| Advanced | ₹30,164 | ₹22,680 | 0.6% |
| Plus | from ₹1,75,000 | — | 0.2% |
Those figures are from shopify.com/in/pricing. POS Pro, if you also sell in person, is an extra ₹7,000 a month per location on the first three plans.
For a merchant in London or Toronto, that fee column is avoidable — they turn on Shopify Payments and it disappears. For you it is a line item forever. Read every Shopify-versus-WooCommerce cost comparison with that in mind.
So what does an order actually cost on Shopify in India?
Shopify's cut sits on top of whatever your gateway charges. Two of the common Indian gateways publish their standard rates openly:
- Razorpay lists 2% on UPI, domestic debit and credit cards, netbanking and wallets, up to 3% on international cards, with no setup fee and no annual maintenance charge. GST at 18% is charged on the fee.
- Cashfree lists 1.95% on UPI, domestic cards, netbanking and wallets, 2.15% on UPI via RuPay credit cards, and 2.99% on international Visa and Mastercard. Again no setup fee or AMC, and GST at 18% on top.
Take Razorpay's 2% plus 18% GST — 2.36% all in — and stack Shopify's fee on it:
| Shopify plan | Gateway (incl. GST) | Shopify's cut | Total taken from each order |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | 2.36% | 2% | 4.36% |
| Grow | 2.36% | 1% | 3.36% |
| Advanced | 2.36% | 0.6% | 2.96% |
| Plus | 2.36% | 0.2% | 2.56% |
On WooCommerce you pay the 2.36% and nothing else. There is no platform cut; WooCommerce's own pricing page says it adds no payment fee and you pay only your processor. That is the entire financial case for WooCommerce, and at some volume it becomes a large number.
On a store doing ₹15 lakh a month — ₹1.8 crore a year — Shopify's cut alone is ₹3,60,000 a year on Basic and ₹1,80,000 on Grow. Hold those two numbers; the rest of this post is about whether WooCommerce costs you less than them.
When is it worth upgrading a Shopify plan?
Before comparing platforms, most stores are on the wrong Shopify plan. The fee tiers mean each upgrade pays for itself at a specific monthly GMV, and you can work it out exactly from the table above using annual billing:
| Upgrade | Extra cost per month | Fee saved | Breaks even at monthly GMV of |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic → Grow | ₹4,100 | 1% | ₹4,10,000 |
| Grow → Advanced | ₹17,081 | 0.4% | ₹42,70,250 |
| Advanced → Plus | ₹1,52,320 | 0.4% | ₹3,80,80,000 |
Two things fall out of that. First, the Basic-to-Grow upgrade pays for itself startlingly early — a store clearing roughly ₹4 lakh a month is already losing money by staying on Basic. Second, the Grow-to-Advanced jump does not pay for itself on fees until about ₹43 lakh a month, so if someone is selling you Advanced on the fee saving at ₹10 lakh a month, the maths does not support it. Buy Advanced for its reporting and checkout customisation if you need those. Do not buy it for the 0.4%.
What does WooCommerce actually cost once you add it all up?
WooCommerce is free. Running WooCommerce is not, and the gap between those two statements is where most unhappy projects live.
WooCommerce's own pricing page is unusually candid about this. It puts hosting at $25 to $350 a month from third-party providers, and official extensions at $29 to $299 a year each, bought à la carte. Cheaper hosting exists — Cloudways' published entry tier starts at $11 a month for 2GB RAM and one vCPU, with a DigitalOcean data centre in Bangalore — but entry-tier shared-ish hosting and a 400-SKU store with live inventory are not the same workload.
The extensions are where quotes quietly inflate. Priced in rupees on WooCommerce's own product pages, a fairly ordinary D2C set looks like this:
| Extension | Price for one year |
|---|---|
| WooCommerce Subscriptions | ₹27,050 |
| AutomateWoo | ₹15,416 |
| Table Rate Shipping | ₹11,538 |
| Total | ₹54,004 per year |
Three extensions, ₹54,004 a year in renewals, before hosting and before anyone touches the code. These are annual licences, not one-off purchases, and they renew whether or not you noticed them in the original proposal.
Then there is the part nobody invoices for until it breaks. WooCommerce 10.8 and later requires PHP 8.3 or newer, MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.6 or newer, WordPress 6.9 or newer and a 256MB memory limit. Somebody has to keep that current. Somebody has to decide whether to migrate to High-Performance Order Storage — default for new installs since WooCommerce 8.2, but existing stores are not migrated automatically and have to opt in. Somebody has to test twelve plugin updates against a live checkout.
On Shopify, all of that is Shopify's problem. That is what the fee buys.
The comparison that actually matters
| Shopify | WooCommerce | |
|---|---|---|
| Platform cut per order in India | 0.2% – 2% depending on plan | None |
| Fixed cost | ₹1,499 – ₹22,680 a month (annual billing), Plus from ₹1,75,000 | Hosting, quoted by vendors at $25–$350 a month |
| Extensions | App subscriptions, monthly | Annual licences, ₹11,000–₹27,000 each is normal |
| Platform and security updates | Shopify's responsibility | Yours |
| Checkout | Shopify's, not editable below Plus | Yours, and you own the bugs |
| Catalogue modelling | Constrained; variants and metafields only go so far | Arbitrary, if someone builds it |
| Realistic time to launch | Days to weeks | Weeks to months |
| Who it suits | A team without a developer | A team with one, or a retainer |
Do Indian gateways work properly on both?
Yes, and this is rarely the deciding factor any more.
On WooCommerce, Razorpay maintains an official plugin with over 100,000 active installations covering cards, netbanking, wallets and UPI. Cashfree and PayU publish their own plugins too. On Shopify, the same gateways ship official apps installed from the Payments settings in your admin.
The difference is not capability, it is cost. Processing a ₹2,000 order through Razorpay costs ₹47 on WooCommerce and ₹87 on Shopify Basic. Same gateway, same shopper, same UPI intent flow. The extra ₹40 is Shopify's integration fee for a payment it did not touch.
One thing worth checking before you commit either way: whether your brand needs international cards. Both Razorpay and Cashfree price those meaningfully higher — up to 3% and 2.99% respectively — and if a real share of your revenue is NRI or export, that rate matters more than the platform argument.
The honest answer, by brand shape
Shopify, if: your catalogue is under a few hundred SKUs with conventional variants, nobody on your team writes code, you want to launch this quarter, and your monthly GMV is low enough that the platform cut is smaller than a maintenance retainer would be. Also if you have had a WordPress site go down at 11pm and do not want to repeat it. Our Shopify development work is mostly this shape of brand, and we rarely argue them out of it.
WooCommerce, if: your GMV is high enough that Shopify's cut exceeds what maintenance costs you, and you have someone who owns the stack — in-house or on retainer. Or if your catalogue genuinely does not fit Shopify's object model: bundles priced by component, B2B tiering, configurable products with dependent options. Or if the store is one part of a larger WordPress content and SEO estate you already run. That is the territory our WooCommerce development work covers.
Catalogue structure deserves more weight than it usually gets. For EcoSprout, a sustainable brand selling into the UK market, the interesting problem was never the checkout — it was keeping 10+ product lines coherent and navigable as the range grew. Platform choice barely touches that. Information architecture does.
Both decisions get easier if you have a realistic build budget in mind first; we keep current website development cost ranges for India updated separately.
What not to do
Do not migrate to WooCommerce purely to dodge the 2%. At ₹15 lakh a month you are saving ₹3,60,000 a year on Basic. That is real. It is also roughly what competent ongoing maintenance costs, and if you skip the maintenance you will spend the saving on an emergency instead. Only move if you are also budgeting for an owner.
Do not pick WooCommerce for control you will not use. "We want full control of the code" is a reasonable thing to want and a terrible reason to choose a platform if nobody on the team has ever opened a PHP file. Control you cannot exercise is just liability.
Do not stay on Basic past ₹4 lakh a month. Run the breakeven table above. This is the single cheapest decision in this post and the one most often left unmade.
Do not accept a WooCommerce quote that does not list annual extension renewals by name. Ask for the line items and the renewal dates. A quote with "plugins as required" in it is a quote with ₹50,000 a year hidden in it.
Do not decide on theme screenshots. Both platforms can be made to look like anything. Neither can be made to fit a catalogue it was not designed for.
If you are genuinely unsure
Work out two numbers before you talk to anyone: your monthly GMV, and what you would realistically pay someone per month to keep a WooCommerce store patched, backed up and working. If the first number times Shopify's fee is smaller than the second, stay on Shopify. If it is comfortably larger, WooCommerce is worth costing properly.
Tell us what you are selling and how much of it and we will do that arithmetic with you — including the version where the answer is to change your Shopify plan and stop thinking about it. We would rather fix a plan tier than sell a migration.
Bharat Vasireddy
Founder & Digital Marketing Strategist8+ years of experience in performance marketing and web development. I help businesses scale through data-driven SEO, Google Ads, and high-performance websites.