Shopify and WooCommerce development company in India for stores that actually ship

What should a Shopify and WooCommerce development company in India set up before launch?

Here's something new store owners rarely expect. The design is hardly ever what hurts them. What hurts is fake COD orders coming back as RTO, a GST invoice your CA won't accept, or shipping rates that quietly lose you money on every parcel to the North East, and none of that shows up in a theme demo.

So most of our hours go into the plumbing. We've been building websites since 2017, and our ads and SEO people sit right next to the developers, which means product feeds, conversion tracking and product page SEO get sorted before you spend a rupee on ads. A pretty store with broken tracking can't be scaled. We've fixed enough of those to know.

Shopify vs WooCommerce: which should you choose?

For most product brands in India I'd say Shopify, simply because it's less to look after. WooCommerce comes out ahead in a few cases, though: odd pricing rules, an existing WordPress site you want to keep, or a real dislike of monthly platform fees.

My rule of thumb? Selling products and don't want to think about servers, go Shopify. Store's just one part of a big content site, or you need wholesale price lists? Then WooCommerce.

Shopify store setup in India: Razorpay, COD, GST and shipping

There's a lot more to a proper Shopify store setup in India than picking a theme. As a Shopify development company in India, we spend most of our setup time on four things.

Payments first. Razorpay (or PayU or Cashfree, if you've already got an account) takes care of UPI, cards, netbanking and wallets, and we test it with real small payments before launch. Heads up: Shopify charges its own transaction fee on top of the gateway's when you use a third-party gateway, so we'll work out what each order actually costs you on your plan.

COD needs rules or it'll eat your margin. We'll cap COD by pincode and order value, add a COD fee if you want one, and put in an OTP or WhatsApp confirmation so fake orders get caught before anybody packs them.

Then there's GST. Your GSTIN goes on invoices and HSN codes go on products. Orders inside your state pick up CGST and SGST, other states get IGST, and the invoice comes out in a layout your CA can actually use. On Tally or Zoho Books? Orders can flow across.

For shipping we normally plug in Shiprocket, though if you've already got a courier you like, we'll use them. Rates go by weight, AWB numbers get generated on their own, and buyers get tracking updates on WhatsApp or SMS. We hook up the Meta catalogue and Google Merchant Center too, so ads can start in week one. Oh, and we're stingy with apps. Fifteen paid ones can cost more than Shopify itself.

WooCommerce development in India for custom catalogues

When do we reach for WooCommerce development instead? Mostly when a store needs rules Shopify handles badly, or only through pricey apps. I'm thinking of dealer price lists, minimum quantities for wholesale buyers, a "request a quote" button where checkout would be, made-to-order furniture with twenty options. Or a shop that sits inside a big WordPress content site.

Is there a downside? Yes, and it's upkeep. Because WooCommerce lives on your own hosting, somebody has to do the updates, check the backups and keep it quick, every month without fail. We build it lean to begin with (light theme, no page builder, as few plugins as we can get away with), and if you'd rather not think about it, our maintenance plan stops the store slowly rotting.

Ecommerce website development in Ahmedabad, with Gujarati storefronts

There's no shortage of Ahmedabad manufacturers and traders moving from IndiaMART leads and WhatsApp orders to a store of their own, whether it's textiles, kitchenware, namkeen or spices. For ecommerce website development in Ahmedabad you're welcome to come and sit with us in Satellite, go through the products together, and have your staff trained on order processing on their own phones.

We also write Gujarati storefront copy for brands that sell mostly within Gujarat. By that I mean titles and descriptions written by a person who speaks Gujarati at home, not something pasted out of Google Translate. The language switcher runs on Shopify's own translation tools, or WPML or Polylang if you're on WooCommerce. Navratri or Diwali sale on the way? Give us a few weeks' warning. The discount codes and banners should be tested before the rush, not during it.

How much does an ecommerce website cost in India?

Ours start at Rs 40,000 for Shopify, and I'd say most finish somewhere under Rs 1.5 lakh. Where you land depends mostly on product count, design work and integrations. WooCommerce we quote after seeing the catalogue and the rules.

Then there are running costs, which people tend to forget (plans, apps, hosting, gateway fees). We list all of it in the quote, so the first month's bills aren't a shock.

Overseas, you can go for a fixed package instead: the Launch store at $3,500 or the Growth store at $7,500.

Can you migrate my store to Shopify without losing Google traffic?

We can. Honestly, keeping the traffic is most of the work. During a Shopify migration we move products, variants, images, customers and order history across, and then every old product and category URL gets pointed at its new home with a 301 redirect. Shopify's URLs follow a fixed pattern (/products/ and /collections/), so skipping redirects really isn't an option.

We've moved stores off WooCommerce, Magento, OpenCart, Wix, BigCommerce and custom PHP builds. One thing that catches people out: customer passwords can't be carried over, so customers get an account invite after launch. Your page titles and meta descriptions stay, and we check Search Console daily for two weeks, fixing 404s as they pop up.

Working with us from Australia, the UK or the USA

Plenty of overseas brands and agencies outsource store builds to an India-based team, and we're set up for it. Our day runs 10 AM to 7 PM IST, which catches the Australian afternoon and the UK morning, and for the US we'll book early or late calls so nobody's up at 2 AM.

On overseas stores we set up Shopify Payments, Stripe, PayPal, Afterpay or Klarna depending on where you sell, plus tax settings for Australian GST, UK VAT or US state sales tax. We configure them; your accountant should sign off the final rules.

Agencies can use us as a white label partner too, for Shopify and WooCommerce builds, theme tweaks and ongoing store support. We work under your brand, sign an NDA and only talk to you unless you tell us otherwise.

How we build your store, step by step

1. Discovery call. We talk through what you sell, where you ship, how you take payment and roughly how many SKUs you've got.
2. Proposal. An itemised quote lands in your inbox with the app list, what the store will cost to run each month, and milestone dates. No nasty surprises later.
3. Catalogue and content. You send a product sheet and photos. Or we write the descriptions, in English, Gujarati or both.
4. Design. Homepage, a collection page and a product page come first, with two rounds of changes. The rest of the store follows that look.
5. Build. The store goes up behind a password, and you can try the checkout on your own phone.
6. Payments, tax and shipping. This is the fiddly bit. We set up gateways, COD rules, GST (or overseas tax) and courier rates, then try them against real addresses, including a couple of awkward pincodes.
7. Test orders. We place real orders, prepaid and COD, refund them, then check invoices, emails, WhatsApp updates and tracking pixels end to end.
8. Launch and handover. We open the store on a weekday morning, never a Friday night. Your team gets a recorded training video, and we stay on support for the first orders.

Frequently asked questions