Shopify pricing in India has two halves, and almost every page written about it covers one. The subscription is published, predictable and easy to find. The transaction fee sitting on top of it is neither, and it exists for a reason that applies to India and to very few of the markets Shopify writes its own pricing pages for.
This is the whole bill in the order you will meet it, with the arithmetic that tells you when moving up a plan pays for itself. Not a comparison and not a quote: a model you can fill in with your own numbers before anyone sends you a proposal.
Every figure here was read from Shopify and Razorpay’s own pages on 3 October 2026. Plan prices and gateway rates move. Confirm the current number before you budget on it, and treat any page that quotes a precise figure without a date, including this one in a year, as out of date.
The four Shopify pricing plans in India
Shopify sells four tiers to Indian merchants, billed in rupees. The monthly price is what you pay month to month; the annual price is what the same plan costs per month when you commit to a year up front. The third-party transaction fee in the last column is the part that matters most here, and the next section explains why it applies to you at all.
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed annually | Third-party fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | ₹1,994 / mo | ₹1,499 / mo | 2% |
| Grow | ₹7,447 / mo | ₹5,599 / mo | 1% |
| Advanced | ₹30,164 / mo | ₹22,680 / mo | 0.6% |
| Plus | From ₹1,75,000 / mo | Negotiated | 0.2% |
| shopify.com/in/pricing, read 3 October 2026 |
Annual billing takes almost exactly a quarter off every tier. On Basic that is a saving of about 5,940 rupees across the year, which is real money on a plan that costs under 24,000 rupees. It is also a year of commitment on a platform you may not have tested properly yet, so the honest advice for a first store is to pay monthly until the store has taken real orders through a real festive season, then switch.
Which tier you start on is partly a build question rather than a billing one. A clean catalogue on a lightly customised theme behaves differently from a store with heavy theme work and several apps interacting at checkout, and the second is where plan limits start to bite. Shopify development in Pune sets out what a build covers at each of three depths, which is the decision underneath the plan choice.
The Grow plan carries a 1% third-party fee. Most of the Indian agency blogs ranking for this term list Basic at 2%, Advanced at 0.6% and Plus at 0.2% and skip Grow entirely, which makes the gap between Basic and Advanced look much larger than it is. Shopify’s own India pricing page lists all four.
The fee exists because Shopify Payments does not operate in India
Shopify has its own payment processor, Shopify Payments. Where it is available, using it means no third-party transaction fee at all, and the percentages in the table above are simply irrelevant. That is the pricing model Shopify designs around and the one its global pricing pages assume.
Shopify Payments is not available in India. Shopify publishes the list of supported countries, and as of October 2026 it runs to roughly forty entries: Australia, Canada, Japan, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the United States and most of western Europe. India is not among them, and Shopify’s own wording for merchants in that position is direct.
Shopify, on supported countries: if your country is not listed, or if Shopify Payments does not support your business category, then you need to use a third-party payment provider.
So every Indian Shopify merchant connects an Indian gateway, and the moment you do, the third-party fee in the table applies. This is the structural fact about Shopify pricing in India and it is why a plan comparison borrowed from a British or American article will mislead you: there, the fee column is usually zero. Here it never is. Choosing which payment gateway to use is a separate decision with its own costs, and it does not change the Shopify fee.
There is no official timeline for Shopify Payments reaching India, and there has not been one for years. Plan on the fee being permanent. If it ever changes, your costs fall, which is a pleasant direction for a surprise to run in.
Your cash on delivery share decides your Shopify bill
Here is the part that almost nothing written about Shopify pricing in India mentions, and it is the single biggest lever on the number. Shopify does not charge the third-party transaction fee on manual payment methods. Its own fees documentation lists them.
Shopify, on transaction fees: you are not charged transaction fees on manual payment methods such as cash, cash on delivery (COD), and bank transfers.
For most Indian stores that is not a footnote, it is half the order book. A store where sixty per cent of orders arrive as cash on delivery pays the Shopify transaction fee on forty per cent of its revenue. The headline 2% on Basic becomes an effective 0.8% of total sales, and the gateway percentage disappears from the COD half as well, because no gateway touched that money.
The same store, two payment mixes
Take ten lakh rupees of monthly sales on the Basic plan, and apply the published rates: Shopify at 2% on gateway orders, Razorpay at 2% plus 18% GST on the fee, which is 2.36% all in. The only thing that changes between these two columns is the prepaid share.
| On ₹10,00,000 of monthly sales | 60% COD, 40% prepaid | 100% prepaid |
|---|---|---|
| Sales through the gateway | ₹4,00,000 | ₹10,00,000 |
| Shopify third-party fee at 2% | ₹8,000 | ₹20,000 |
| Razorpay at 2% plus GST | ₹9,440 | ₹23,600 |
| Total payment cost | ₹17,440 | ₹43,600 |
| As a share of all sales | 1.74% | 4.36% |
The payment cost of the same revenue is two and a half times higher for the prepaid store. That is not an argument for pushing customers towards cash on delivery, because COD has its own costs that do not appear on any Shopify invoice: return to origin losses, the courier’s COD remittance fee, and the working capital tied up while the money comes back. We have written about what cash on delivery actually costs separately, and the honest summary is that COD is cheaper on payment fees and more expensive almost everywhere else.
It does mean that any Shopify cost estimate quoted to you as a flat percentage of revenue is wrong unless whoever wrote it asked for your prepaid and COD split first. If they did not ask, they were working from a template.
When moving up a plan pays for itself
Because the fee falls as the plan rises, there is a point where the higher subscription is cheaper overall. It is a straightforward sum, and it is the most useful thing on this page, but it turns on prepaid sales rather than total sales, for the reason the last section explained.
Using annual billing prices, Basic to Grow costs 4,100 rupees more per month and saves one percentage point of fee. Grow to Advanced costs 17,081 rupees more per month and saves 0.4 of a point.
| Move | Extra per month | Fee saved | Break-even prepaid sales |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic to Grow | ₹4,100 | 1.0 point | about ₹4,10,000 a month |
| Grow to Advanced | ₹17,081 | 0.4 point | about ₹42,70,000 a month |
| Arithmetic on the annual-billing prices above |
Read that second row carefully, because it is where money gets wasted. Advanced only repays its own subscription on fee savings alone once you are putting something like forty-three lakh rupees a month through the gateway. At sixty per cent COD that is a store selling over a crore a month. Plenty of Indian merchants are sold Advanced long before that, usually for a reporting feature or a shipping rate calculation that an app on Grow would have covered.
- Work out your prepaid sales per month, not your total sales
- Compare that against the break-even figures above at today’s plan prices
- If a feature rather than the fee is driving the upgrade, price the app that does the same job first
- Re-run the sum after your festive peak, not during it
One more thing before you move up a tier. Of the two percentages on a prepaid order, the gateway's is the larger, and unlike Shopify's it is negotiable at volume. Moving to a better rate, or adding a second provider to route around one, is payment gateway integration work rather than a plan change, and it usually saves more than the plan upgrade would.
The gateway percentage is a separate bill
Shopify’s transaction fee is not your payment cost. It is a fee for using a payment provider that is not Shopify, charged on top of what that provider charges you. Both land on the same order.
Razorpay publishes a 2% platform fee on domestic cards, UPI, netbanking and wallets, with 18% GST on that fee, and up to 3% on international cards. The other major Indian gateways sit in a similar band and all of them negotiate at volume. On Basic, a prepaid domestic order therefore carries 2% to Shopify and 2.36% to Razorpay: about 4.36% before you have paid for the product, the packaging or the courier.
UPI is worth a line of its own. Regulated merchant discount rate on UPI is zero, which is why a lot of advice says UPI is free to accept. Razorpay’s 2% is charged as a platform fee rather than as MDR, so it applies to UPI anyway on the standard published rate card. If a large share of your orders are UPI, that is the specific thing to negotiate, and it is worth asking about before you pick a gateway rather than after.
Nothing about this is hidden, but it is split across two invoices from two companies, one of which bills in a foreign currency. That is why stores routinely under-budget payment costs by half: they add up the Shopify side, see 2%, and stop.
If a real share of your revenue is dealer or wholesale orders, the question changes shape rather than scaling. Large invoices on agreed credit terms do not pass through a gateway at all, so neither percentage applies to them, and what matters instead is the credit position and the approval rules. That is the trade B2B ecommerce and dealer portal development exists to make, and it is a different cost model from the one on this page.
The 18%, and the one thing to do before your first invoice
Shopify charges GST on its fees to Indian stores. You can stop it charging that GST by giving Shopify your GSTIN, and there is a timing rule attached that costs people money every month because nobody reads it until afterwards.
Shopify, on India billing: exemptions to GST charges apply only to invoices issued after you submit your GSTIN. GST charges incurred on invoices issued before you submit your GSTIN are valid and cannot be reversed or refunded.
So this is a five minute job on day one, not a thing to tidy up at the end of the quarter. Submit the GSTIN in your Shopify billing settings before the first invoice is issued. Anything charged before that is gone, and the amount is 18% of every month you leave it.
GST then also applies to your own sales, which is a different subject with its own traps around place of supply, HSN codes and shipping charges. Shopify does not produce a compliant Indian tax invoice out of the box. What that invoice has to contain, and how stores get there, is covered in GST invoicing for Indian ecommerce.
And the 18% on your gateway’s fee is a separate 18% again, charged by an Indian company on an Indian invoice, which behaves normally for input credit purposes. It is the Shopify side, billed from outside India, that has the GSTIN rule.
Apps are the line that grows without a decision
The subscription is one number and the fees are percentages. Apps are neither, which is why they end up being the line nobody can explain. Each one is a small monthly charge in dollars, added on a different day, by a different person, to solve a problem that was urgent that week.
An Indian store usually ends up paying for some subset of the same list: a COD and order verification app to cut return to origin losses, a shipping and courier integration, a GST invoicing app because the native invoice is not compliant, a product reviews app, a WhatsApp notification app, and a page builder somebody installed during the build and nobody has removed since.
Price the stack, not the app
Six apps at ten dollars a month is roughly 60,000 rupees a year, which on Basic is three times the subscription. Write the total down once a quarter. It is the only way the number stays visible.
Count the speed cost as well as the rupees
Most apps inject script into the storefront. Three or four of them is a measurable hit to the page speed that your category pages are judged on, and you are paying monthly for it.
Ask what happens when you remove one
Apps that store data you need, review content, subscription records, loyalty balances, are not really removable later. Those are decisions. The rest are rentals.
Check annual billing on the ones that offer it
Several apps discount annually the way Shopify does. On a stack you have already decided to keep, that is a free reduction.
Keeping the list short and the apps current is ongoing work even though Shopify removes the server from the picture. There is nothing to patch and still a stack to tend, which is the narrower thing an ecommerce website maintenance plan covers on Shopify, as against the much larger thing it covers on WooCommerce.
This is the one cost line where Shopify and WooCommerce behave more alike than people expect. The names and the billing dates differ; the discipline problem is identical. Our WooCommerce running-cost guide makes the same argument about plugin renewals, which is the same trap wearing different clothes.
A year of Shopify costs in India, assembled
Putting the published rates together for an illustrative store: Basic on annual billing, ten lakh rupees of monthly sales, sixty per cent cash on delivery, a GSTIN submitted on day one, and a modest app stack. These are the lines, not a quote for your store.
| Line | Basis | Year one |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify subscription | Basic, annual billing, ₹1,499 a month | ₹17,988 |
| Shopify third-party fee | 2% of ₹4,00,000 prepaid a month | ₹96,000 |
| Gateway | 2% plus GST on the same prepaid sales | ₹1,13,280 |
| Apps | Six apps at roughly ten dollars a month | about ₹60,000 |
| Theme | One-off, if you buy rather than build | ₹0 to ₹35,000 |
| Domain | Renewed annually | about ₹1,200 |
| Illustrative total, before any build cost | about ₹3,00,000 |
Two things are worth noticing about that table. The subscription, which is the number everyone compares, is six per cent of it. And the payment lines together are seventy per cent of it, which is why the prepaid and COD split matters more than the plan choice for most stores at this size.
Not in that table: building the store. Design, catalogue, integrations and launch are a one-off project cost and a different question entirely, with its own drivers. What an ecommerce website costs to build covers those, and conflating the two is how a cheap platform ends up attached to an expensive year.
Where Shopify stops being the cheaper answer
Shopify’s costs are mostly proportional to sales, and its fixed costs are low. That is exactly the right shape for a store that is starting, and the wrong shape for one with high prepaid volume and thin margins, because the percentages keep scaling after the work has stopped.
Low volume, high COD share, no technical staff
The fee lands on a small slice of revenue, the subscription is trivial, and nobody on your side has to own hosting, security or updates. This describes most first stores and a great many profitable ones.
Growing prepaid volume
Run the break-even sums above before assuming the next plan up is the answer. Often the cheaper move is to stay and negotiate the gateway rate, which is the larger of the two percentages.
High prepaid volume on thin margins
When the payment lines are the biggest cost in the business and the platform fee is a fixed share of them, a platform with no per-order cut starts to repay the maintenance burden it brings with it.
That is as far as this page goes on the comparison, deliberately. The full head to head, including the parts where Shopify wins on things that are not money, is in Shopify versus WooCommerce for an Indian store, and the running cost of the alternative is in what a WooCommerce store costs to run. Read both before switching anything. Replatforming to save two per cent is a decision people regret more often than they expect.
Questions we get asked about this
How much does Shopify cost per month in India?
On annual billing, 1,499 rupees a month for Basic, 5,599 for Grow and 22,680 for Advanced, as published on Shopify’s India pricing page in October 2026. Paying monthly instead costs about a quarter more on every tier. The subscription is usually the smallest part of what the store actually costs you, because the transaction fee and the gateway percentage scale with sales while the plan does not.
Why does Shopify charge me a transaction fee when I already pay Razorpay?
Because Shopify Payments is not available in India, so you are using what Shopify classes as a third-party payment provider. The fee is for that, and it is charged on top of whatever your gateway charges. It is 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. In the countries where Shopify Payments operates, merchants using it pay none of this, which is why pricing articles written for those markets do not prepare you for the Indian bill.
Does Shopify charge a fee on cash on delivery orders?
No. Shopify’s own documentation lists cash, cash on delivery and bank transfers as manual payment methods and states that transaction fees are not charged on them. For a store with a large COD share this materially changes the cost of the platform, and it is the reason any Shopify cost estimate expressed as a flat percentage of revenue should be treated as guesswork unless somebody asked for your payment mix first.
Is Shopify’s annual billing worth taking?
It takes roughly a quarter off the subscription, which on Basic is about 5,940 rupees a year. For a store that has been trading for a while and is staying put, take it. For a first store, pay monthly until you have been through a real festive peak on the platform, because a year of commitment is a poor trade against finding out in month four that your pricing rules do not fit.
How do I stop Shopify charging me GST?
Submit your GSTIN in Shopify’s billing settings. The important part is the timing: Shopify states that the exemption applies only to invoices issued after you submit it, and that GST charged on earlier invoices is valid and cannot be reversed or refunded. Do it before the first invoice rather than at the end of the quarter.
What does it cost to build the Shopify store itself?
That is a separate question and a one-off rather than a monthly, driven by catalogue size and quality, how much of the theme is custom, which integrations are in scope and whether your product content exists yet. None of it appears on a Shopify invoice. The cost guide sets out the drivers , and the Shopify development page sets out what a build covers.