Almost everyone who asks us this question has already read a feature table. Feature tables are close to useless here. Both platforms run serious stores, and the twenty rows where they differ are mostly rows you will never touch.
Three things actually decide whether you are happy in two years: what each platform costs you per order rather than per month, how much of the checkout you are permitted to change, and who is responsible when something breaks at nine on a Saturday night.
One of those three has a specifically Indian answer, and it is the one most comparison articles miss because they are written for a market where Shopify Payments exists. In India it does not, and that single fact changes Shopify's running cost in a way no plan comparison page shows you.
We build on both platforms and have no stake in which you choose, so what follows compares them rather than recommending one. Where we have a sourced figure it is named and dated. Where we do not, the shape of the thing is described rather than invented, because a guide carrying a made-up number is worse than one carrying none.
The short answer, before the detail
If you want one paragraph and no reading: Shopify suits people who want the platform to be somebody else's problem and can absorb a per-order fee to get that. WooCommerce suits people who need the store to do something specific, and who have someone, in-house or on a retainer, who will keep WordPress patched.
You are buying an outcome and would rather not own infrastructure.
- You sell a reasonably standard catalogue to retail customers
- Nobody in the business wants to think about hosting, backups or updates
- Your margin can carry a percentage fee on every order
- You can live with the checkout doing what Shopify decided it does
- Getting live quickly matters more than doing it your way
You need the store to fit a business that already has rules.
- Your pricing, ordering or invoicing has logic a template will not express
- You sell to dealers or distributors as well as to retail buyers
- Order volume is high enough that per-order fees start to hurt
- You want the checkout and the data to be yours to change
- You are prepared to own the updates, or to pay someone to
Everything below is the reasoning behind that split, in roughly the order the questions come up in a first meeting. If neither of these two turns out to fit, the broader question of which ecommerce platform is right for an Indian business covers hosted, open source, headless and custom.
Which one are people actually using
Worth getting out of the way, because it comes up in every conversation and the honest answer is that the question is badly posed. There is no single market-share number for either platform, and the figures people quote at each other are usually measuring different things.
| What the source counts | What it reports |
|---|---|
| W3Techs, share of known ecommerce systems | WooCommerce around 49%, or 8.3% of all websites |
| Store Leads, live stores counted | Roughly 4.34 million WooCommerce, 2.84 million Shopify |
| HTTP Archive, mobile origins, May 2026 | WooCommerce 6.64%, Shopify 4.76% |
| Why they disagree | Different denominators, different detection |
WooCommerce meaning, in this context, is simply a plugin that turns a WordPress site into a shop, which is most of why its store count runs so high. Read those three rows together and a consistent picture appears. By raw number of stores, WooCommerce leads, because it is free to install and it sits on top of WordPress, which a very large share of the web already runs. By revenue and by presence in the high-traffic tier, Shopify does considerably better than its store count suggests.
None of this should influence your decision. Popularity tells you how easy it will be to hire someone and how many plugins exist, and both platforms clear that bar comfortably. It tells you nothing about whether the platform fits your business.
What it costs, and the fee Indian stores keep missing
Start with the shape, because that is stable even when the numbers move. Shopify is a fixed monthly subscription plus apps plus a percentage of every order. WooCommerce is hosting plus plugin licences plus maintenance, with no percentage taken by the platform itself.
| Where the money goes | How it behaves |
|---|---|
| Shopify subscription | Fixed monthly, predictable, never zero |
| Shopify apps | Monthly, per app, and it accumulates quietly |
| Shopify transaction fee | A percentage of every order, on top of your gateway |
| WooCommerce hosting | Monthly, and it rises with traffic and catalogue size |
| WooCommerce plugins | Mostly annual licences, some one-off, some free |
| Payment gateway | A percentage on both, negotiable on both at volume |
| Maintenance | Optional-looking on WooCommerce, unavoidable in practice |
| Where people get caught | Year two, not month one |
The India-specific part: Shopify Payments does not operate here
Shopify Payments, Shopify's own payment product, is not available in India. The commonly cited reason is the Reserve Bank of India's regulatory framework for payment aggregators and cross-border settlement. Whatever the cause, the effect is the same for every Indian merchant: you must connect a third-party gateway such as Razorpay, PayU, CCAvenue or Cashfree.
That matters because Shopify charges an additional transaction fee whenever Shopify Payments is not used. In most Shopify markets that fee is avoidable. In India it is not. Everyone pays it, on every order, forever.
| Shopify plan tier | Third-party transaction fee |
|---|---|
| Entry tier (Basic) | Around 2% of order value |
| Mid tier | Around 1% |
| Advanced | Around 0.5% |
| Plus | Around 0.15% |
| On top of this | Your gateway MDR, typically 2% to 3%, plus 18% GST on it |
Widely reported figures as of August 2026, and they are worth confirming against Shopify's current India pricing page before you commit. The structure is what matters: on an entry plan an Indian store can be paying roughly 4% to 5% of revenue in combined platform and gateway fees, before it has paid for a single app.
Work that through on your own numbers rather than ours. At ten lakh a month in sales, a 2% Shopify fee is twenty thousand rupees, every month, in addition to the subscription and in addition to the gateway. Upgrading a plan tier to cut that fee can pay for itself well before the extra subscription cost bites, which is a calculation worth doing annually rather than once.
WooCommerce has no equivalent. The platform takes nothing per order; your gateway still does. That is the single strongest argument for WooCommerce at volume, and the single most common reason we see stores replatform onto it. Against that, WooCommerce hosting is a real line item that grows with you, and so is maintenance. Our ecommerce cost guide sets out the eight drivers that move a build price in Pune, which is a separate question from what a WooCommerce store costs to run.
Compare the two over three years, not per month, and put an honest maintenance line in the WooCommerce column even if you intend to do it yourself. A comparison where one side is allowed to assume free labour is not a comparison.
Payments and cash on delivery
Both platforms connect to the Indian gateways you would expect, and both handle UPI, cards and netbanking through them. Choosing a gateway is largely independent of choosing a platform, which is why choosing a payment gateway deserves its own decision rather than being inherited from one.
Cash on delivery is where the two genuinely diverge, and it carries more weight in India than almost anywhere else. ET Prime Research put COD at 60% to 65% of all Indian ecommerce orders in 2024, rising towards 75% in smaller cities and towns, while metros have moved the other way and now run above 70% prepaid. If your customers are outside the top eight cities, COD is not an edge case for you. It is the main case.
The reason it matters to a platform decision is that last figure. Every refused delivery costs you freight in both directions, packaging, staff time and whatever you spent acquiring that customer. Controlling COD is therefore not a nice-to-have, and the two platforms make it very different amounts of work.
Available, but rules around it (value caps, pin-code restrictions, phone verification, part payment) generally mean an app, because the checkout is closed to your code. That is another monthly cost and an honest trade: you are not maintaining the logic yourself.
The same rules are reachable in code. Payment method availability can be filtered on cart total, pin code, customer history or anything else you can compute, with no monthly fee and no app conflicts. We have written up exactly how to add COD charges in WooCommerce, filter by filter. Somebody has to own that code through updates.
If COD is a small share of your orders, this difference is not worth deciding on. If it is most of them, it is one of the two or three things that should actually drive the choice, alongside the transaction fee above. Either way, the controls only work if courier data flows back into your admin, which is an integration question rather than a platform one.
GST invoices and talking to your accountant
Neither platform produces a compliant Indian tax invoice out of the box, and neither is designed around GST. Both get there by different routes, and both routes have a trap in them. Whether you need a GST registration at all is a separate question, and it turns on whether you also sell through a marketplace.
What a compliant invoice needs
Your GSTIN and the buyer's where applicable, HSN codes per line item, the correct split between CGST and SGST or IGST depending on place of supply, and a sequential invoice number that does not reset.
On Shopify
Tax rates configure without much trouble. The invoice document itself is an app. Check that the one you pick genuinely applies place-of-supply logic rather than a flat rate, because several do not, and the difference only becomes visible when you file.
On WooCommerce
Plugins exist and are widely used, and because the document is generated on your own server you can change the format when your accountant asks for something specific. They will ask.
The part that decides it either way
How the data reaches your books. If somebody is re-typing orders into Tally by hand at month end, the invoice format was never the problem.
Ask your accountant what they need from an accounting integration before you choose a plugin or an app, not after. We have twice rebuilt an invoicing setup that worked perfectly and produced a document the accountant would not accept.
How much you are allowed to change
This is the real dividing line, and no feature table captures it, because it is not a feature. It is a boundary, and it is the thing that most often shapes how a build actually goes rather than anything on a pricing page.
Everything except the checkout
Themes, templates, product pages and content are yours to rewrite. The checkout is not. You extend it within what Shopify permits, and where that is not enough the answer is an app or a plan upgrade rather than code. For most retail stores this never becomes a problem. For anything with unusual ordering rules it is the whole problem.
All of it, including the parts you should not touch
Every step of cart and checkout is filterable. That is genuinely powerful and genuinely dangerous: the same freedom that lets you add a credit-limit check lets somebody install three plugins that each modify the order total. Freedom without discipline is how WooCommerce stores become unmaintainable.
A useful test before you decide. Write down the single most unusual thing your business does: a pricing rule, an approval step, a delivery constraint, a customer type that pays differently. If that thing lives inside the checkout, WooCommerce will fit it and Shopify will need an app or a workaround. If it lives anywhere else, both handle it and this section decides nothing.
Occasionally the honest answer is that neither fits, and the rules belong in a custom ecommerce build. That is rarer than people who want a custom build think, and more common than people selling platforms admit.
If you also sell to dealers
Manufacturers and distributors ask this question with a second store in mind, and the answer shifts. Dealer ordering needs customer-specific pricing, credit limits, minimum order quantities and usually an approval step, all of which sit exactly where Shopify's boundary falls. WooCommerce handles it natively enough that most of the work becomes defining your own rules rather than fighting the platform. Our B2B portal page sets out what those rules involve.
Shopify does sell a B2B capability on its higher plans and it is a real product, not a checkbox. What it has to reach is set out in how dealer ordering portals work. Whether it reaches your rules is a question to answer with your actual price list open in front of you, not from a feature page.
Can it do dealer pricing?
Both can, at some level. The answer is always yes and it tells you nothing.
Can it do our dealer pricing, including the exceptions?
Bring the three customers whose pricing nobody in the office can explain. Whichever platform expresses those without a workaround is the one that fits.
One more thing that catches people out. If you sell both retail and to dealers, you need both sets of rules, and they should not be tangled together in one checkout. Deciding that early is cheaper than discovering it after launch.
Search visibility
Both rank. Anyone telling you one is inherently better for SEO is selling something. What differs is how much of the technical surface you control, and that only becomes significant once the catalogue is large, at which point category pages and filter URLs matter far more than the platform beneath them.
Shopify imposes fixed path segments for products and collections. It is not a ranking penalty and it has never stopped a store ranking, but it is not yours to change. WooCommerce URLs are entirely yours.
Filter combinations generating thousands of crawlable URLs is the most common technical problem we find on large stores. Controllable on both, and considerably easier to control when you own the server.
Shopify is fast by default and hard to make dramatically faster. WooCommerce can be faster and is routinely slower, because it is only ever as good as its hosting and its plugin count.
Identical on both, and this is where nearly all the difference in outcome actually comes from. Category copy, product detail and internal linking beat platform choice by a wide margin.
If your catalogue runs to a few hundred products, platform choice is close to irrelevant for search and you should decide on the other sections. Past a few thousand, crawl control starts to matter and the extra freedom is worth something real. Our ecommerce SEO work runs on both, and so does product feed and Merchant Center work, which is where most Indian stores see paid and organic overlap first.
Who keeps it running
The question people skip, and the one that predicts regret better than any other. Both platforms need maintenance. Only one of them makes it look optional.
Shopify does it for you
Hosting, security patching, uptime and platform upgrades are Shopify's job. You remain responsible for your apps and your theme, and an abandoned app is still a liability, but the floor beneath you belongs to somebody else.
WooCommerce does not
WordPress core, PHP versions, WooCommerce itself and every plugin need updating, in an order that does not break the store, ideally on a staging copy first. This is real work at a real cadence.
The failure mode
A WooCommerce store nobody has updated for eighteen months. It works right up until it does not, and then it is a security incident rather than a maintenance task.
The honest budget line
If you choose WooCommerce, decide now who applies the updates and put it in writing. In-house is fine. A retainer is fine. "We will sort it out later" is the option that costs money.
None of that is an argument against WooCommerce. We build plenty of WooCommerce stores and they run for years. It is an argument against choosing it without answering the question. We run maintenance for stores on both platforms, including ones we did not build.
If you are already on one
Moving between them is a project, not a weekend. Products, variants, customers, order history and, most importantly, every URL that currently ranks has to move, with a redirect map that accounts for the paths that change shape rather than just the ones that change host.
Most stores considering a migration do not have a platform problem. They have a theme problem, a plugin problem, or a nobody-has-touched-this-in-two-years problem, and a migration is an expensive way to fix any of those. Establish which it is before committing.
The strong reasons to move are narrow and specific. The platform cannot express something the business genuinely needs, or the running cost has drifted well past what the store earns, which on Shopify usually means the transaction fee has become the largest single line. The weak reasons are that the admin feels dated, or that a competitor is on the other one.
If you do move, plan it with a rollback and treat the redirect map as the deliverable that matters. Our redesign and migration page sets out what actually moves and what breaks.
How to decide this week
- Take your monthly revenue and multiply it by the Shopify fee for the plan you would be on. Look at that number, then decide whether it is worth what you get.
- Write down the most unusual rule your business has. If it lives in the checkout, that alone narrows the choice.
- Answer who will apply updates, by name, before you consider WooCommerce.
- Total both options over three years with a maintenance line in each, not per month.
- Ask your accountant what they need on an invoice, and confirm the platform can produce it.
- If COD is most of your orders, work out which rules you need before choosing, not after.
- Ignore every feature you cannot name a use for. They are not free, because somebody maintains them.
| If this is true of you | Shopify | WooCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Standard retail catalogue, no unusual rules | Good fit | Good fit |
| Nobody will own updates | Good fit | Avoid |
| A rule that lives inside the checkout | Needs an app or a workaround | Good fit |
| Dealer pricing, credit limits, approvals | Higher plans only | Good fit |
| High order volume, thin margin | Per-order fee compounds | No platform cut |
| You want live in weeks, not months | Good fit | Slower |
| Catalogue in the thousands, crawl control matters | Workable | More control |
| No technical person anywhere near the business | Good fit | Avoid |
| If most rows say the same thing | That is your answer | If they split, read the sections again |
If you go through that list and the answer is still not obvious, it genuinely does not matter much for your business, and you should pick whichever one the person maintaining it is more comfortable with. That is a better tiebreak than any feature table.
If it is obvious, the next question is what a build on that platform actually involves. That is what our pages on Shopify development in Pune and WooCommerce development in Pune are for.
Tell us how orders reach you today, retail or dealer or both, and what your pricing does that a template would not express. We will tell you which platform fits and why, including when the answer is the one we would earn less on.
Questions we get asked about this
Is WooCommerce actually free?
The plugin is. The store is not. You pay for hosting, a domain, an SSL certificate, usually several plugin licences, and either your own time or somebody else's to keep it all updated. It is often cheaper than Shopify over three years, particularly at volume where Shopify's per-order fee compounds, and it is never zero.
Why does Shopify charge extra on Indian stores?
Because Shopify Payments, its own payment product, is not available in India, and Shopify applies an additional transaction fee to every order that does not go through it. In markets where Shopify Payments operates, merchants can avoid that fee by using it. In India nobody can, so it becomes a permanent percentage of revenue on top of your gateway charges.
Which one is better for SEO?
Neither, in any way that decides a ranking. Both produce crawlable, fast-enough stores, and the difference in outcome comes almost entirely from category copy, product detail and internal linking. WooCommerce gives you more control over URLs and crawl behaviour, which starts to matter on catalogues in the thousands rather than the hundreds.
Can I move from Shopify to WooCommerce later, or the other way?
Yes, and it is a project rather than an export. Products, customers and order history move with effort; the part that decides whether your search traffic survives is the redirect map. Plan it as a migration with a rollback, not as a switch.
We sell to retail customers and to dealers. Which handles that?
WooCommerce, in most cases we see, because dealer rules such as customer-specific pricing, credit limits, minimum quantities and approval steps sit exactly where Shopify's checkout boundary falls. Shopify does offer B2B on higher plans and it is worth evaluating against your real price list rather than against a feature page.
Do you have a preference?
Not one we apply before hearing what the business does. We build on both, and the platform that fits is decided by your rules, your order volume and who will maintain it. If we recommend one, we will tell you what it costs you to pick it and what you give up.