Clothing brand website cost in India: Shopify or WooCommerce?

A clothing brand website in India costs about ₹20,000 to ₹80,000 to set up on Shopify and ₹30,000 to ₹1,20,000 on WooCommerce, and a mid-range store with 200 to 1,000 products is quoted at ₹1,50,000 to ₹3,00,000. Shopify is faster to launch but takes a monthly plan fee plus 2% of every online payment on its Basic plan. WooCommerce has no plan fee and no cut of your sales, but you pay for hosting and for someone to look after it.

Those are market figures from Indian agencies and the platforms' own price pages, not my prices. I'm a freelance web developer in Gurugram with clients in India, the UK and the US, and online stores are a big part of what I build. Website design for a clothing brand has a few problems other shops don't have: sizes, returns, cash on delivery and a lot of photos. This guide covers what you'll pay, which platform suits which kind of label, and what to ask before you hire anyone.

How much does a clothing brand website cost in India?

A clothing brand website cost in India starts near ₹15,000 for a template store and runs past ₹3,00,000 for a store with a large catalogue. The platform matters less than three other things: how many products and sizes you have, whether the design is a ready theme or made for you, and how much has to connect to the site (shipping, WhatsApp, billing).

Here is how the published ranges line up.

You'll also see much bigger numbers. One agency's page for clothing sites quotes a high-complexity build at ₹14,00,000 to ₹20,00,000 over 12 to 18 weeks, with product recommendations, a chat shopping assistant and automated WhatsApp campaigns. That's a real price for a real scope, but a label doing its first few hundred orders a month doesn't need it. If a quote looks ten times higher than another one, check the feature list before you check the price.

One more thing about the low end. The cheapest quotes usually assume you'll upload the products yourself. With clothing that is a lot of work: a kurta in 5 sizes and 4 colours is 20 separate options (called variants) to set up with stock counts. Ask whether product upload is in the price, and how many products.

What moves the price up or down?

Five things move most clothing website quotes:

• Design. A ready theme changed to your colours and fonts is the cheap route. A design drawn for your brand in Figma (a design tool) and then built costs more because every page is made by hand.
• Catalogue size. More products mean more upload time, more photos to resize and more filters to plan.
• Photography. This is rarely in a developer's quote, and it's often the biggest gap between a store that looks cheap and one that looks like a brand.
• Connections. Shipping partners, WhatsApp order updates, GST invoices, a billing tool. Each one adds work to the quote.
• Who builds it. Developer time in India is quoted anywhere from ₹500 to ₹5,000 an hour, which is a tenfold spread before you compare a single feature.

Related guide: Shopify to WooCommerce migration: cost and what moves

What goes into website design for a clothing brand?

Website design for a clothing brand is mostly about helping someone decide on fit and fabric without touching the garment. If the photos, the size guide and the returns promise are good, the rest of the site can be quite plain.

These are the parts I'd insist on, in the order they affect sales.

Photos that show fit. Every product needs a front, a back, a close-up of the fabric and at least one photo on a person, with the model's height and the size they're wearing written next to it. Flat photos on a white sheet tell a shopper nothing about how a dress falls.

A size guide with your own measurements. A chart copied from the manufacturer isn't enough if your pieces run small. Give chest, waist and length in inches and centimetres for each size, and put the link beside the size buttons, not at the bottom of the page. Size and colour mismatch is listed as the main reason fashion orders are returned, so this one page pays for itself.

Size and colour buttons that are easy to tap. Most of your visitors will be on a phone, often arriving from Instagram. Sizes should be big buttons, sold-out sizes should be greyed out, and picking a colour should change the photo.

Filters that match how people shop. Size, colour, price, fabric and occasion. A shopper who is a size L doesn't want to open twelve products to find the two that are in stock for her.

A clear returns and exchange page. Say how many days, who pays for the return pickup, and whether it's a refund or store credit. Link it from every product page. People buy more easily when they know what happens if it doesn't fit.

Fast pages. Clothing sites carry more photos than almost any other kind of shop. If they aren't compressed and sized properly, the site crawls on mobile data. This is a build-quality point, and it's one place where a cheap build shows.

A short checkout. Phone number, address, pay. Offer UPI, cards and cash on delivery. Don't force people to create an account before they can pay.

Nice-to-haves come later: a wishlist, "complete the look" suggestions, a lookbook page, reviews with customer photos. They help, but they don't rescue a store with poor photos and no size chart.

If writing product descriptions for 150 pieces sounds painful, my free Product Description Writer turns your product details into store copy and image alt text you can paste in.

Shopify or WooCommerce: which is cheaper for a clothing brand in India?

Shopify is cheaper to start and WooCommerce is cheaper per order. Shopify charges a plan fee and a percentage of online payments. WooCommerce charges neither, but you pay for hosting, a few paid add-ons and upkeep.

First, what each one is. Shopify is a rented shop: you pay a monthly fee and Shopify runs the servers, security and updates. WooCommerce is a free add-on that turns a WordPress website into a shop. You own it and can change anything, but hosting (the server your site lives on) and updates are your job or your developer's.

What does Shopify charge in India?

Shopify's own India price page lists the plans like this.

That last column is the one people miss. In most countries Shopify waives its fee if you use Shopify's own payment service. That service isn't available in India, so every Indian store uses a gateway such as Razorpay, PayU or Cashfree (a gateway is the company that collects card and UPI payments for you) and pays Shopify's fee on top.

Razorpay's standard charge is 2% per successful payment, with 18% GST on that fee, which works out to 2.36%. Add Shopify's cut and the total on each online order is 4.36% on Basic, 3.36% on Grow and 2.96% on Advanced. On WooCommerce you pay the gateway's 2.36% and nothing else. Cash on delivery orders are exempt from Shopify's fee, because no gateway handles them.

A worked example for a small label

Take a label doing 250 orders a month at an average of ₹1,600. That is ₹4,00,000 in monthly sales. Say 60% of orders are paid online, so ₹2,40,000 goes through the gateway. (These sums are mine, using the rates linked above.)

• WooCommerce with Razorpay: 2.36% of ₹2,40,000 is ₹5,664 a month.
• Shopify Basic with Razorpay: 4.36% of ₹2,40,000 is ₹10,464 a month, plus the ₹1,499 plan.

So Shopify costs this label about ₹4,800 a month more in fees, or roughly ₹57,600 a year, plus about ₹18,000 a year for the plan. Against that, WooCommerce needs hosting at ₹6,000 to ₹24,000 a year and a developer on call, with bug fixes and updates quoted at ₹3,000 to ₹15,000 a month. At this size the two are close. If you'd need to pay someone monthly to look after WooCommerce, Shopify is probably the same money for less worry.

The picture changes as sales grow. At ₹10 lakh in monthly online sales, one comparison puts payment costs at ₹23,600 on WooCommerce against ₹43,600 to ₹47,200 on Shopify Basic, a gap of at least ₹20,000 every month. Another Indian agency puts the point where WooCommerce clearly wins at ₹15 to 25 lakh in monthly sales.

A quick check if you're already on Shopify Basic: moving to Grow costs ₹4,100 more a month on yearly billing and saves 1% of online sales. By my arithmetic, that pays for itself once online payments pass about ₹4.1 lakh a month.

Which platform suits which clothing brand?

My honest view: pick Shopify if you're launching your first collection, selling mostly through Instagram, and there's no developer in your life. Pick WooCommerce if you already have steady orders, you care about the fee on every order, you want a design nobody else has, or you plan to bring in shoppers through Google with guides and lookbooks. One guide suggests Shopify Basic for brands under roughly 30 orders a day, and that matches what I'd tell a friend.

I've written a longer comparison in Shopify vs WooCommerce if you want the non-clothing detail.

What does a clothing website cost to run each month?

A small clothing store costs about ₹3,500 to ₹8,000 a month to run on Shopify Basic and ₹1,500 to ₹4,000 on WooCommerce, before payment fees and shipping. The plan or hosting is only part of it. Apps, plugins and messaging tools make up the rest.

The usual monthly and yearly items:

• Domain name. A .in address is about ₹600 to ₹1,000 a year and a .com ₹800 to ₹1,200.
• Theme. Shopify has free themes, and paid ones are a one-time purchase priced in dollars. A weekly count of Shopify's theme store shows a median of $300 across 330 paid themes. Premium WooCommerce themes run ₹4,000 to ₹12,000.
• Apps and plugins. Shopify apps for things like size charts, reviews and COD checks are usually rented, at ₹800 to ₹8,000 a month or more in total. WooCommerce plugins are more often a one-time or yearly fee, and are quoted at ₹3,000 to ₹16,000.
• Shipping tool. Services like Shiprocket connect your store to courier companies. The WooCommerce plugin is free and the paid tiers are quoted at ₹199 to ₹799 a month, with the courier charge for each parcel on top.
• WhatsApp order updates. Tools for this start around ₹999 a month.
• Upkeep. On Shopify this is small. On WooCommerce, budget for updates, backups and fixes, either your own time or a developer's.

Add it up over a year, not a month. One Indian estimate puts first-year cost at ₹62,000 to ₹1,76,000 on Shopify and ₹48,000 to ₹1,68,000 on WooCommerce, build included. The ranges overlap almost fully, which tells you the platform choice is less about year-one price than about how you want to run the shop.

For a line-by-line WooCommerce budget, see how much a WooCommerce website costs in India.

How do COD and returns change the website you need?

Cash on delivery and returns are where Indian clothing brands lose the most money, and the website can reduce both. A store that makes prepaid easy and sizing clear will keep more of each sale than a prettier store that ignores them.

Some numbers first. In ClickPost's FY2026 data from D2C brands (brands selling direct to shoppers), 37.51% of COD orders came back undelivered, against 5.28% of prepaid orders. The trade calls this RTO, short for "return to origin": the parcel went out, nobody accepted it, and it came back. For fashion and apparel the typical COD band was 21% to 32%. ClickPost also models the loss at about ₹350 on a ₹1,200 order once you count shipping both ways, packing and handling. That figure is an estimate from their model, not a measured average.

Run it on a small label. If 100 of your orders this month are COD and 21 to 32 of them come back, at ₹350 each that's ₹7,350 to ₹11,200 gone (my sum, from ClickPost's figures). That's several times the Shopify Basic plan fee.

Then there are ordinary returns, where the customer received the piece and sent it back. One 2026 benchmark puts fashion returns at 25 to 40% on COD orders and 12 to 18% on prepaid. That page doesn't say how the figures were gathered, so treat it as a rough guide.

What the website can do about it:

• Make prepaid the easy choice. UPI first in the list, and a small discount or free shipping for paying online.
• Charge a small COD fee, or limit COD. Both platforms can do it. On WooCommerce, COD is built in and free, and rules like "no COD above a certain order value" or "no COD for certain pin codes" are a small plugin or a few lines of custom code. On Shopify they're usually an app.
• Confirm COD orders before shipping. An automatic WhatsApp or SMS asking the buyer to confirm catches fake and impulse orders.
• Fix sizing at the source. The size guide, model measurements and "runs small" notes from the design section above. A return you prevent costs nothing.
• Offer exchange before refund. A simple exchange request page keeps the sale.

Ask every developer you speak to how they'd handle COD rules and exchanges. If they haven't thought about it, they haven't built a clothing store for India before.

Related guide: Ecommerce website developer in India: cost and what to check

What about GST and selling outside India?

GST on clothing depends on the price of each piece, and selling abroad needs a few extra parts in the store. Both are easy to plan for at the start and annoying to add later.

On tax, readymade garments are charged 5% GST up to ₹2,500 a piece and 18% above that, following the GST Council's changes of September 2025. If your range crosses that line, your store needs two tax classes and your product prices need to be set with care. A kurta at ₹2,499 and one at ₹2,600 are taxed very differently. Confirm the rates with your CA before launch. Your developer sets up the tax rules, but shouldn't be your tax adviser.

Selling outside India is a real option for ethnic wear, because the buyers are often Indians living in the UK, the US, Canada and the Gulf. It needs prices shown in the shopper's currency, a checkout that accepts foreign cards, shipping rates by country, and pages fast enough to load well far from your server. International cards cost more to accept too: Razorpay lists up to 3% for payments from overseas customers.

I did this kind of work on Wow Vastra, an Indian fashion boutique based in the UK that runs on WooCommerce. I built its new homepage, added a currency switcher and set up worldwide checkout, and the store loads in 1.5 seconds. The overseas parts are small pieces of work on their own, but they touch prices, shipping and payment all at once, so plan them into the first build if you can.

How long does website design for ecommerce take?

Website design for ecommerce takes two to four weeks for a theme-based clothing store and four to eight weeks for a mid-range store of 200 to 1,000 products, going by the published timelines. The build is rarely what holds things up. Photos, product details and slow sign-off are.

A typical order of work looks like this.

1. 1

   Scope and platform

   Agree on the pages, the number of products, payment and shipping partners, and Shopify or WooCommerce.

2. 2

   Design

   Pick and adjust a theme, or design the home, collection and product pages for your brand.

3. 3

   Build and connect

   Set up the store, size and colour options, filters, payment gateway, shipping tool, GST and order emails.

4. 4

   Load the catalogue

   Upload products with photos, size charts and descriptions. For clothing this is often the longest step.

5. 5

   Test and launch

   Place real test orders by UPI, card and COD on a phone, check the emails and the shipping labels, then go live.

Three things you can do to keep it on time. Finish the photo shoot before the build starts. Put your products in a spreadsheet (name, price, sizes, colours, fabric, stock) so they can be imported in one go. And name one person on your side who can approve things, because a design waiting on three opinions waits a long time.

How do you choose a clothing website developer in India?

Choose a clothing website developer in India by looking at stores they've built that are live and taking orders, then asking how they'd handle sizes, COD and returns for your brand. Price comes after that, because a cheap store that leaks returned parcels is the expensive one.

Questions worth asking on the first call:

1. Can I see two live stores you built, and place a test order? Open them on your phone on mobile data. Check how fast the product photos load.
2. Which platform would you choose for me, and why? A good answer mentions your order volume, your team and your fees. "We only do Shopify" or "we only do WordPress" is a sales pitch.
3. Who uploads the products, and how many are included?
4. How will COD rules, exchanges and size charts work?
5. Whose name are the accounts in? The domain, the Shopify account or hosting, the payment gateway and the shipping tool should all be registered to your email and your business, with the developer added as a user.
6. What happens after launch? Ask how long fixes are free, and what monthly support costs after that.
7. What is not in this quote? Photography, copywriting, paid themes, app fees and courier charges are the usual gaps.

Red flags I'd walk away from:

• A fixed price given before anyone asked how many products you have.
• The store built on the developer's own account "to make it simpler".
• No written list of pages and features.
• A promise of first-page Google rankings.
• A rented theme or app licence that belongs to the developer, so your site breaks if you part ways.
• No test orders shown before launch day.

On freelancer or agency: a freelancer usually costs less and you talk to the person doing the work. An agency brings a designer, a developer and a project manager, which helps on bigger catalogues and costs more. For a first store with under a few hundred products, either works if the answers to the questions above are good.

How can I help with a clothing brand website?

I build WooCommerce stores myself, and I set up Shopify stores with my e-commerce partners, so I don't have a reason to push you towards one platform. I'll ask about your order volume, your payment mix and who will run the store, then tell you which one I'd pick in your place.

What I can take on for a clothing label:

• A WooCommerce store built from your Figma design or from a ready theme, with size and colour options, product filters, a tidy checkout, Razorpay or another gateway, and currency switching if you sell abroad.
• A Shopify store with a custom theme and the apps an Indian store needs, delivered with my e-commerce partners and with me as your single point of contact.
• Custom rules that off-the-shelf plugins don't cover. I write custom WordPress plugins, so things like special COD or delivery rules can be built to fit how you work.
• Speed work on a store that already exists. Clothing sites are heavy with photos, and fixing image sizes and loading order is part of the Core Web Vitals work I do.

I've built stores from a Figma design with product filters and an optimised checkout before, and the Wow Vastra work above was a fashion boutique selling worldwide. I haven't run a clothing brand, so I won't tell you what to stock or how to price it. I'll tell you plainly what the website side will take.

I don't publish my prices here because they depend on the catalogue and the design. You'll get a written quote with every page and feature listed.

What should you do next?

Write down four things: how many products and sizes you'll launch with, how many orders a month you expect in the first year, what share you think will be COD, and whether you'll sell outside India. Those four answers decide the platform and most of the price.

Then send them to me through the contact page, or book a 20-minute call there. I'll reply with the platform I'd choose for your label, what I'd build first, and a written quote.