Shopify or WooCommerce for my first store in India?
The short answer
For a first D2C store in India, default to Shopify unless you already know WordPress cold or need heavy content/SEO customization from day one. Shopify hands you hosting, security, a UPI/Razorpay-ready checkout and support baked in, so you spend your first three months selling instead of patching plugins. WooCommerce looks cheaper on paper, but the 'free' plugin still needs paid hosting, security patching and a developer on call the moment something breaks - a real cost most first-time founders underprice.
A quick summary to orient you. The real value is below: the resources worth your time, from people who've actually done it, not us.
Here are the resources
Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time. India-specific ones carry a badge.
4 resources3 India-specific4 link-checked
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📄 Article
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Why we picked it
Shopify's own comparison page is unavoidably self-interested, but it's the clearest side-by-side of the structural difference that actually matters - hosted-and-managed versus self-hosted-and-owned - before you get lost in feature lists.
Why we picked it
Written for the Indian D2C founder specifically, it weighs COD-heavy checkout behaviour, payment gateway support and app-ecosystem depth rather than generic global feature comparisons - the framing you actually need before spending a rupee.
Why we picked it
The most complete rupee-denominated breakdown of what Shopify actually costs an Indian merchant once you add GST, the third-party payment-gateway fee (since Shopify Payments isn't available in India) and plan tiers - the hidden-cost math founders skip until the first invoice.
Plans run roughly Starter ₹399, Basic ₹1,499, Grow ₹5,599, Advanced ₹22,680 and Plus from ₹1,75,000 per month before 18% GST - figures change, verify current pricing.
Because Shopify Payments isn't live in India, every merchant also pays a 2%/1%/0.5%/0.15% third-party transaction fee depending on plan, on top of the payment gateway's own charge.
Grow becomes cheaper than Basic once monthly revenue crosses roughly ₹4 lakh, purely from the transaction-fee saving.
Why we picked it
One of the few pieces that actually maps Shopify, WooCommerce, Dukaan and Zoho Commerce against Indian founder stages - budget-first, ecosystem-locked, or scale-ready - instead of treating every platform as competing for the same buyer.
