The honest INR bands for online stores
Ecommerce pricing in India swings from ₹40,000 Shopify templates to ₹50,00,000 headless builds, and almost nobody explains the difference. Here are the published bands from the cost calculator, senior-independent India-market pricing:
| Store scope | Honest band (INR) | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify store, ~50 products, tuned theme | ₹2,15,000 – ₹11,00,000 | 6–12 weeks |
| WooCommerce store, same scope | ₹1,80,000 – ₹9,60,000 | 6–12 weeks |
| Store + custom checkout/payment flows | ₹4,50,000 – ₹13,60,000 | 8–16 weeks |
| Headless / high-SKU / marketplace-grade | ₹10,00,000+ | 4–8 months |
The platform matters less than the decisions around it. A disciplined WooCommerce store beats a careless Shopify plus-store on every metric that pays: speed, checkout completion, and cost of change.
Where the money actually goes
- Catalog and content. Product photography, descriptions, variants, shipping logic. The most underestimated line: budget ₹20,000–₹1,50,000+ depending on SKU count.
- Payments. Razorpay, Cashfree, Stripe or PayPal integration: scoped work, not a checkbox. GST invoicing and COD flows add real decisions.
- Apps and integrations. Inventory sync, WhatsApp commerce, analytics, email flows. Each is scoped separately in a written quote.
- Performance. Checkout completion dies on slow stores. Speed work is not optional on ecommerce.
- Care. Stores break on plugin updates, shipping rate changes and festive-season traffic. A senior care plan runs ₹12,000–₹42,000/month and earns it back in one prevented outage.
The hidden costs that kill Indian ecommerce budgets
- Theme licenses and paid apps renewing yearly: ₹20,000–₹80,000/year if unchecked.
- Shipping aggregation setup and RTO flows nobody scoped.
- Content: every product page needs copy that sells, not spec dumps.
- Festive-season changes: every Diwali sale needs engineering lead time. Plan it in September.
Red flags in store quotes
- "Free ecommerce website with hosting", the money arrives in forced app subscriptions and per-order fees.
- No mention of checkout completion, page speed or Core Web Vitals anywhere in the proposal.
- Payment gateway "integration" quoted as a flat one-liner with no flows: cards, UPI, COD, partial payments, refunds.
Run your own numbers
The cost calculator has an online-store mode: tap store, set your product count, tick payments and apps, press = and the India and international bands compute live. Copy the brief it generates into any quote request and compare replies on scope, not vibes.