Ask five agencies what an online store costs and you will get five numbers between ₹15,000 and ₹15 lakh. That is not because anyone is lying. It is because “e-commerce website” describes anything from a Shopify theme switched on in an afternoon to a custom B2B platform with ERP integration.
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This is what actually drives the number, so you can read a quote and know what you are looking at.
What decides the price
Six things, roughly in order of impact:
- Platform — Shopify, WooCommerce, or custom. Each has a different floor.
- Design — a configured theme, a customised theme, or a design built from scratch.
- Catalogue size and complexity — 20 simple products is not 5,000 SKUs with variants and tiered pricing.
- Integrations — payments, shipping, GST invoicing, ERP, marketplace sync. Each one is real work.
- Content — who writes the copy and shoots the product photos. This is the most commonly forgotten line item.
- Who builds it — a freelancer, a small studio, or a large agency with account managers you also pay for.
Platform by platform
Shopify
The fastest route to a working store. Hosting, security, checkout and PCI compliance are Shopify’s problem, not yours.
What you pay for: theme (free themes are genuinely usable; paid ones are a one-time cost), setup and configuration, product upload, payment and shipping setup, and any customisation beyond what the theme offers.
What drives it up: custom sections, apps with monthly fees that quietly compound, and anything the theme was not designed to do. A heavily customised Shopify build can cost more than a straightforward WooCommerce one.
Running costs: monthly Shopify plan, app subscriptions, and transaction fees depending on your payment setup. App costs creep — budget for them honestly rather than discovering them in month four. More on setup at Shopify store setup.
WooCommerce
The software is free. Nothing else is.
What you pay for: hosting (cheap shared hosting will be slow — this is not the place to save), theme, premium plugins for payments, shipping and GST invoicing, and development time.
What drives it up: plugin sprawl. Every feature is a plugin, every plugin is a potential conflict, and someone has to maintain them.
Running costs: hosting, plugin licence renewals, and maintenance. That last one is real work and the most commonly skipped line in a quote. An unmaintained WordPress store will eventually be compromised.
Custom build
Justified when your business genuinely does not fit a platform — complex B2B pricing rules, deep ERP integration, marketplace-style multi-vendor logic, unusual fulfilment.
What you pay for: everything, including things the platforms gave you free. Checkout, payments, security, admin, hosting.
The part people underestimate: custom software needs maintenance forever. Budget for a developer relationship, not a project.
Honest advice: if a platform can do it, use the platform. Choosing custom because it sounds more professional is the single most expensive mistake in this article.
The costs quotes usually leave out
This is where budgets break — not on the build, on everything around it.
- Product photography. Nothing damages conversion like bad photos. Either budget for a shoot or budget for the sales you will not make.
- Copywriting. Someone has to write the product descriptions. Supplier text hurts both SEO and conversion.
- Content migration. Moving an existing catalogue is real work, especially with variants.
- Payment gateway setup and KYC. Not usually charged, but it takes time and needs your documents.
- GST-compliant invoicing. Non-negotiable in India, sometimes a paid plugin.
- Post-launch fixes. Two to four weeks of small things. Ask whether they are included, in writing.
- Ongoing maintenance. Updates, backups, security. Monthly, forever.
- SEO. A new site with no content and no links ranks for nothing. Ads or SEO have to follow the build.
How to read a quote
Ask these before signing anything:
- Is the design custom or a theme? A perfectly good answer is “a theme, customised” — but the price should reflect it.
- How many revision rounds? Unlimited revisions is not real; two or three defined rounds is.
- Who writes content and shoots photos? Get this in writing.
- What is the post-launch support period? Two weeks is thin. A month is fair.
- What are the monthly costs after launch? Every app, plugin and licence, listed.
- Do I own everything? Domain, hosting, code, accounts — in your name, not the agency’s. This one matters more than people realise, and you find out when you try to leave.
- What happens if we are late, or you are? A written timeline with milestones.
Red flags: a quote with no written scope, a price far below everyone else’s, “SEO included free”, and any agency that will not tell you which platform they are using and why.
Cheap vs expensive — where the difference actually shows
A cheap build usually saves money by skipping the things you cannot see on day one: performance, mobile behaviour under real conditions, security, proper analytics, and any thought about how the site will rank.
You discover this in month three, when the store is slow on mobile, the checkout drops people, nothing ranks, and the developer has moved on. Rebuilding costs more than building it properly did.
That does not mean expensive is safe. It means you should be able to see, in the quote, what the money buys.
What we would actually recommend
- Starting out, standard catalogue: Shopify with a good theme, properly configured. Spend the saved money on photography and ads.
- Content-led brand, in-house technical help: WooCommerce, on proper hosting.
- Complex B2B or unusual logic: custom, but only after confirming no platform can do it.
- Existing store that underperforms: get it audited before rebuilding. Speed, product pages and checkout fixes often beat a rebuild at a fraction of the cost — see speed optimization.
Want a straight number for your situation? WhatsApp +91 92113 84333 with what you sell and roughly how many products, and we will send a written scope and a fixed quote — no packages, no surprise invoices. More about how we build: e-commerce website development.
Related: Shopify vs WooCommerce for SEO · Core Web Vitals for Shopify
Want a Straight Number?
Tell us what you sell and roughly how many products on WhatsApp at +91 92113 84333. You get a written scope and a fixed quote — no packages, no surprise invoices.