If you're starting or rebuilding an online store, you will quickly face the same choice every brand does: Shopify, WooCommerce on WordPress, or a store built from scratch. Each is the right answer for someone. This guide explains which one is right for you, based on what we see building and fixing stores for brands in India.
The short answer
- Shopify if you want to sell reliably with the least effort, and your products and checkout are fairly standard. This covers most D2C brands.
- WooCommerce if you already run a WordPress site, want full ownership of your data and hosting, and have someone to look after updates.
- A custom store if you have unusual product logic, very high traffic, or a store so important to your business that speed and control justify the cost.
Side by side
| Shopify | WooCommerce | Custom store | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Setup cost | Low to medium | Low to medium | High |
| Monthly running cost | Plan fee plus apps | Hosting plus paid plugins | Hosting and maintenance |
| Speed on mobile | Good, if you limit apps | Varies widely | Excellent when built well |
| Security and updates | Handled by Shopify | Your responsibility | Your developer's responsibility |
| Flexibility | High within Shopify's rules | Very high | Unlimited |
| Ease for your team | Excellent | Good | Depends on the admin built |
| Best for | Most D2C brands | WordPress users, content-heavy shops | Complex or high-volume stores |
Shopify
Shopify runs the hosting, security, checkout and updates for you. You pay a monthly plan and choose a theme, and your team can add products and run sales without a developer. Its checkout is fast and trusted, which matters for conversion.
Watch out for: apps. Every Shopify app you install adds features and scripts, and stores with fifteen or twenty apps are often painfully slow on phones. Monthly app fees also add up quietly. A good build uses only the apps that earn their place and builds simple features into the theme instead.
Payments in India: Shopify works with Indian gateways such as Razorpay, PayU and Cashfree for UPI, cards, net banking and wallets, and supports cash on delivery. Check the transaction fees on your plan for the gateway you choose.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce turns a WordPress website into a store. The software is free and you own everything, which appeals to brands that already have a WordPress site with years of content and search rankings.
Watch out for: maintenance and speed. You are responsible for hosting, updates, backups and security. Each plugin is another thing to update and another way for the site to break or slow down. A WooCommerce store on cheap shared hosting with a heavy theme can easily take ten seconds or more to load on a phone. Run our free website check on yours to see.
A custom store
A custom store is built for your exact needs: a fast storefront in a modern framework, connected either to Shopify's backend (often called headless commerce) or to your own system.
Choose it when: you sell configurable or made-to-order products, run subscriptions or B2B pricing that doesn't fit a template, need the fastest possible pages because traffic is large, or want an experience that no theme can give you.
Watch out for: cost and dependency. You need a team to build it and to look after it. For most brands under a few thousand orders a month, it isn't worth it yet.
Speed matters more than the platform
Whatever you choose, most of your customers will arrive on a mid-range phone over mobile data. In October 2026 we tested the sites of eight Indian startups that had just raised funding, several of them D2C brands. Six took ten seconds or more to show their main content on a typical phone. The platform was rarely the problem: oversized images, too many apps and heavy themes were. Our guide on why websites are slow on mobile covers the fixes.
When to switch
Consider moving platforms when:
- Your WooCommerce site breaks after updates or keeps getting slower, and maintenance is eating your time.
- Shopify app fees and workarounds cost more each month than a custom feature would cost once.
- Your store is so slow that a rebuild would pay for itself in conversions.
A migration should keep your products, customers, order history and, critically, your Google rankings. That means redirecting every old URL to its new address.
How we can help
We build Shopify stores and custom storefronts for brands in India, set up payments and shipping, and fix slow stores. See our e-commerce development page, or read what a website costs in India. If you're unsure which platform suits you, ask us and we'll give you a straight answer.