For most small brands and startups, Shopify is the right starting point. It provides catalogue, checkout and order tools, while you still configure payments, tax settings, shipping and the content of the store. Custom e-commerce makes sense when your catalogue, pricing or buying flow does not fit a standard store, or when you are building a marketplace. A middle path is headless: Shopify as the commerce back end, a custom front end on top.
Shopify plans and fees (India)
Last verified: October 2026, from the Shopify India pricing page. Prices are in INR for the India storefront and exclude any taxes shown at billing. Plans, prices and promotions change, so check the page before deciding.
| Plan | Monthly billing | Yearly billing (per month) | Third-party gateway 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 | n/a | 0.2% |
The gateway fee is Shopify's extra charge when a customer pays through a third-party payment provider instead of Shopify's own payments. The gateway's own processing fee is separate. Which payment options you can use depends on your country, so confirm availability for your business on Shopify's pages before assuming a gateway works. We did not verify which gateways are available to Indian merchants, so check that directly.
The practical point: at low volume the fee is small, but as sales grow, the plan you need is partly decided by this percentage. Work it out with your expected monthly sales.
What a Shopify store gives you
- Hosted checkout, cart, order management and inventory.
- Themes and an app store for extra features.
- Hosting and platform security operated by Shopify; account access, app choices and store configuration remain your responsibility.
- A familiar admin for non-technical staff.
The trade-off is that you work inside its model. Product, variant and collection structures have limits, and checkout customisation is restricted on lower plans.
When custom makes sense
Custom (or headless) becomes worth discussing when one or more of these is true:
- Marketplace logic. Multiple sellers, commissions, split payouts, seller onboarding. Standard stores are built for one merchant. Offease, an office-space marketplace in India, is an example of a listings product where Apex built a public site and an admin portal rather than a store template.
- Unusual pricing. Quotes, tiered or contract pricing, per-customer price lists, rental or time-based pricing.
- Unusual catalogue rules. Highly configurable products, bundles with dependency rules, or very large catalogues with custom attributes.
- B2B. Approval workflows, credit terms, account hierarchies, bulk ordering.
- Front-end experience. A brand-led storefront that themes cannot deliver without fighting them.
If none of these apply, custom is probably spending money to recreate what Shopify already does.
The headless middle path
Headless means Shopify keeps products, cart, checkout and orders, while you build the storefront yourself, for example in Next.js. Shopify's Storefront API is a GraphQL API for building custom shopping experiences covering product browsing, cart and checkout.
Benefits: full control of design and performance, one back end for staff. Costs: you now maintain a front end, including SEO, caching, and the features themes used to provide. See Next.js rendering strategies for SEO for the choices involved.
Our default: start on a standard theme, and go headless only when a specific front-end need is costing sales, not because it sounds modern.
Total cost of ownership
| Cost | Shopify (standard) | Headless on Shopify | Fully custom |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build | Low | Medium to high | High |
| Platform fees | Plan plus gateway fee | Plan plus gateway fee | Hosting and services |
| Payments, tax, fraud | Configure included tools and integrations | Configure commerce tools plus your integration | Integrate and maintain the required services |
| Ongoing engineering | Low | Medium | High |
| Apps and plugins | Monthly app fees | Fewer, but you build some | You build or buy |
| Security responsibilities | Platform plus merchant configuration | Platform, merchant and frontend team | Application team plus infrastructure vendors |
| Flexibility | Limited by platform | High on front end | Highest |
The hidden cost in a custom build is not the launch, it is the years of maintenance: payment changes, security patches, new features. For payment gateway choices in India see Stripe vs Razorpay in India.
App sprawl
Shopify's strength is its app ecosystem. The weakness is that each app adds a recurring fee, some script weight on the storefront, and another vendor to depend on. Ten apps at modest monthly fees can cost more than the plan itself.
Before installing an app, ask whether the feature is core to your sales, whether it slows pages, and what happens to your data if you uninstall it. Review the list every quarter.
Lock-in
- Shopify: you can export products, customers and orders, but themes, apps and checkout behaviour are specific to the platform. Moving off means rebuilding those.
- Custom: dependencies move to the chosen framework, data services and the people who know the code. Insist on source access and documentation. See our note on ownership in custom website cost in India.
- Headless: you remain tied to Shopify's back end, but can replace the front end.
Choosing
- Launching a small brand or testing demand: Shopify, standard theme.
- Growing, with a clear front-end limit: consider headless on Shopify.
- Marketplace, B2B or unusual pricing: scope a custom build, ideally validated as an MVP first. See how to build an MVP.
If you are unsure where your store falls, our product team can help you scope it.