Ecommerce Website Cost in India 2026: Prices by Store Type

This guide is for manufacturers, distributors, retailers and D2C founders in India who want to sell online and need a realistic budget before talking to a developer. By the end you will know the four common store types and what each costs, how a hosted subscription platform compares with a custom build over three years, what payment and shipping integration really involve, how GST fits in, and how to read a quotation so you are comparing like with like.

How much does an ecommerce website cost in India

The honest answer depends on what the store has to do, not on how it looks. A store that lists 40 products and collects enquiries on WhatsApp is a very different build from one that manages 3,000 SKUs with sizes and colours, calculates courier rates by pincode and files GST-compliant invoices automatically.

The table below gives the bands we quote and see across Gujarat and the rest of India for a custom build by a professional team. Prices are one-time, exclude GST on the invoice, and assume you supply product photos and descriptions.

Store type	What is included	Build cost (one-time)	Timeline
Catalogue with enquiry	Up to 200 products with categories and filters, product pages, WhatsApp and enquiry form, admin panel to add products, mobile-friendly design, basic SEO setup	₹40,000 to ₹90,000	2 to 4 weeks
Small store (up to 100 products)	Cart and checkout, UPI and card payments through a gateway, order emails and WhatsApp alerts, flat or weight-based shipping, order management, coupon codes, GST invoice PDF	₹1.2 lakh to ₹2.5 lakh	4 to 7 weeks
Mid-size store with payments and shipping	Everything above plus product variants, inventory sync, courier aggregator integration with live rates and tracking, returns workflow, customer accounts, reviews, abandoned-cart reminders, reports, integration with your billing or ERP	₹2.5 lakh to ₹6 lakh	8 to 14 weeks
Marketplace or multi-vendor	Vendor onboarding and dashboards, commission rules, split settlements, vendor-wise shipping, dispute handling, admin approval flows, scale-ready hosting	₹6 lakh to ₹15 lakh and above	14 to 24 weeks

Two things move the price more than anything else. The first is how many outside systems the store must talk to: gateway, courier, billing software, SMS and WhatsApp. The second is how many business rules live inside the store: dealer pricing, minimum order quantities, pincode-based delivery, bulk discounts. Each rule is a small piece of work, but twenty of them add up.

What drives online store development cost up or down

When quotes for the same brief differ by three times, the difference is almost always in one of these items.

• Product data: 50 products with two variants each is a day of data entry. 2,000 products with sizes, colours and dealer prices needs a bulk import tool and a cleanup exercise before launch.
• Design: a proven layout adapted to your brand costs far less than a fully custom design with animations.
• Payments: one gateway with UPI, cards and net banking is standard. Cash on delivery, EMI options, partial advance for made-to-order goods, and dealer credit terms each add checkout logic.
• Shipping: flat rate is simple. Live courier rates by weight and pincode, multiple pickup locations and automated label printing take real integration effort.
• Integrations: syncing stock and orders with the billing or ERP software you already run avoids double entry, and this is usually the most valuable part of the project for an established business.
• Content and SEO: category descriptions, product copy and schema markup are often left out of the quote and added later at a higher price.

Hosted platform vs custom ecommerce: which one should you pick

There are two routes. A hosted platform is a subscription service where you pick a theme, add products and pay a monthly fee plus a share of each transaction. A custom build is software written for your business, hosted on your own cloud account, with no per-transaction platform cut. Compare them on total cost over three years rather than on the first invoice.

Factor	Hosted platform subscription	Custom ecommerce website
Upfront cost	₹0 to ₹60,000 for theme setup and product entry	₹1.2 lakh to ₹6 lakh for a typical store
Monthly cost	₹2,000 to ₹25,000 subscription, plus paid add-ons for reviews, abandoned cart, GST invoices and so on	₹1,500 to ₹8,000 hosting and monitoring
Transaction charges	Gateway fees plus, on many plans, a platform fee per order	Gateway fees only
Custom business rules	Limited to what the platform and its add-ons allow	Anything you can describe: dealer pricing, MOQ, pincode rules, B2B credit
Integration with your ERP or billing	Possible through connectors, often with a monthly fee and gaps	Built directly against your database or API
Ownership	Data is exportable, but the store itself stays on the platform	You own the code, the database and the hosting account
Time to launch	1 to 3 weeks	4 to 14 weeks
Best for	Testing demand, fewer than 100 SKUs, standard retail flows	Established sellers, B2B, integrations, unusual pricing or fulfilment

A simple rule: if you are testing whether people will buy at all, start hosted and keep the spend small. If you already have sales, dealers, a billing system and specific rules, a custom store usually costs less over three years and stops the monthly add-on bills from creeping up.

Payment gateway and shipping integration costs

These two integrations confuse first-time sellers because the fees come from your developer, the gateway and the courier.

Payment gateway

1. Onboarding: Indian gateways need your business PAN, GST registration, bank account and a website with visible terms, privacy and refund pages. Approval takes two days to two weeks depending on your category.
2. Transaction fees: gateways charge a percentage per successful payment, with UPI often cheaper than cards and some payment methods carrying a fixed component. Check the current rate card of the gateway you choose; rates vary by method and by negotiated volume.
3. Integration work: connecting one gateway with checkout, webhooks for confirmation, refunds from the admin panel and failed-payment handling is ₹15,000 to ₹40,000 as part of a custom build. Adding a second gateway or EMI options costs extra.

Shipping

1. Manual dispatch: you book couriers yourself and paste the tracking number into the order. Zero integration cost, fine below 10 orders a day.
2. Courier aggregator: one integration gives you multiple couriers, live rates, label printing and tracking updates. Integration work is ₹25,000 to ₹60,000, and the aggregator charges per shipment.
3. Own logistics or dealer pickup: common for heavy goods from Rajkot and Morbi: the store calculates a freight estimate and the final dispatch happens through your transporter. This is a set of business rules rather than an API integration.

Our payment gateway integration page describes the checkout, refund and settlement flow in more detail.

GST, invoices and the compliance items people forget

Selling online does not change the GST rules that apply to you, but it does change how many invoices you raise and how quickly. Build these in from day one rather than patching them after the first month of returns.

• GST registration: sellers making taxable supplies through their own website are generally required to be registered; check the current rules and thresholds on the official GST portal for your situation, especially for interstate sales.
• Tax-inclusive pricing: consumers expect to see the final price. The store should store the HSN code and GST rate per product and show the tax breakup on the invoice.
• Invoice numbering: sequential, financial-year-wise numbers that match what your accountant files. If you also sell offline, decide whether the website and the shop share a series.
• Credit notes: returns and cancellations need credit notes, not deleted invoices.
• Policy pages: gateways insist on terms, privacy, shipping and refund pages. The Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules also set expectations on seller details and grievance contact, so keep them visible.
• Data protection: store only the customer data you need and keep access limited, in line with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act. Check the official portal for current obligations.

If the store pushes orders into your accounting and GST billing software, most of this becomes automatic and your CA stops asking for exports every month.

Maintenance and running costs after launch

Typical monthly figures for a custom store in India:

• Hosting and CDN: ₹1,500 to ₹8,000 depending on traffic and image volume.
• Domain, SSL and email: ₹200 to ₹800 a month averaged over the year.
• Transactional SMS, email and WhatsApp: ₹500 to ₹5,000 depending on order volume.
• Maintenance retainer: security updates, backups, small changes and monitoring, 10-15% of the build cost per year, or ₹3,000 to ₹10,000 per month.
• Marketing: not part of the website cost, but a store without traffic earns nothing. Plan for SEO or ads from month one.

Worked example: a kitchenware brand moving from marketplace-only to its own store

Consider a stainless steel kitchenware maker with about 350 SKUs that already sells through third-party marketplaces and wants its own store to protect margins and collect customer data. The requirements: variants by size and set, UPI and card payments, cash on delivery in select pincodes, courier aggregator integration, GST invoices, order sync to the existing billing software, and WhatsApp order updates.

1. Build: mid-size store band, ₹3.6 lakh including design adaptation, product import from a spreadsheet, gateway and courier integration, and a billing-software connector.
2. Content: product photography and copy done in-house, ₹0 to the developer.
3. Running cost: hosting ₹3,000, messaging ₹1,500, maintenance ₹6,000, about ₹10,500 a month.
4. Transaction costs: gateway and courier charges scale with orders and are paid per order rather than as a fixed platform fee.

Over three years the total is roughly ₹3.6 lakh plus ₹3.8 lakh in running costs, or about ₹7.4 lakh. A hosted platform with the same add-ons, at ₹12,000 to ₹18,000 a month plus per-order platform fees, lands in a similar range or higher over three years, without the billing-software sync and without owning the store. That is the comparison worth doing for your own numbers, and our cost calculator gives a first estimate in a few minutes.

What JK Tech Hub has seen on ecommerce projects in Gujarat

A few patterns from stores we have built for businesses in Rajkot, Morbi, Surat and Ahmedabad.

A bearings distributor in Rajkot wanted a public store but most of its buyers were repeat dealers. We built dealer logins with contract pricing and credit limits on top of a normal retail store. Dealers now place orders at night instead of calling in the morning, and office staff process them from a single screen.

A ceramic tile exporter in Morbi asked for a catalogue site with enquiry first. Six months and 400 enquiries later, they added sample ordering with a small advance through UPI. Starting with the catalogue tier and adding payments later cost about 20% more than building everything at once, but they learned what buyers wanted before paying for it.

The most common problem we see is not the website but the data behind it. One imitation jewellery seller had 1,800 products with inconsistent names and no weights, so courier rates could not be calculated. Two weeks of cleanup came before any code was useful. Budget for data work on any store with more than a few hundred products.

How to decide and what to ask before you sign

Write down your store type from the first table, count your SKUs and variants, list every system the store must connect to, and note any pricing or delivery rule that is specific to your business. That one page will get you comparable quotes.

Then ask each vendor: who owns the code and hosting account; what is included in the price and what is billed later; how product data will be imported; how the gateway, courier and billing integrations will be tested; and what the monthly cost will be at your expected order volume. A written scope listing features one by one is the single best protection against a budget overrun. Our ecommerce development page shows how we structure that scope.

Related reading and next step

• Ecommerce website and store development
• Payment gateway and UPI integration
• Inventory management software that syncs with your store
• How much website development costs in India
• Estimate your project with the cost calculator

Send us your product count, the systems you already use and the payment and delivery rules you need, and we will reply with a fixed-price quote within two working days through the contact page or on WhatsApp at +91 7265004040.