eCommerce Without the Monthly Platform Tax

The honest answer depends on what you value. WooCommerce has no monthly platform fees — you pay for hosting (₹1,500–5,000/month) but not per transaction beyond payment gateway fees. It's more customisable at the PHP level — checkout flow, product types, and admin workflows can all be modified. Shopify is easier to operate and has better uptime SLAs but charges $29–$299/month plus 0.5–2% transaction fees unless you use Shopify Payments. For stores that need deep customisation or have complex product logic, WooCommerce. For stores that want simple, reliable, managed eCommerce, Shopify.

A standard WooCommerce store with a custom theme and 2–3 payment gateways: ₹2–5 Lakhs. A WooCommerce store with subscriptions, memberships, or complex product bundles: ₹4–9 Lakhs. An enterprise WooCommerce store with custom plugins, REST API, and third-party integrations: ₹10–25 Lakhs. Fixed-price quote after requirements review.

WooCommerce can handle significant volume with the right infrastructure — Redis for object caching, proper database indexing, a CDN for static assets, and a VPS or cloud server sized appropriately. The weak point is checkout under traffic spikes — WooCommerce's session-based checkout doesn't scale horizontally as easily as hosted platforms. For consistently high volume (10,000+ orders/day), Shopify Plus or Magento may be a better long-term fit.

Yes — WooCommerce Subscriptions is a paid plugin ($199/year) that handles recurring billing well. Sign-up fees, trial periods, variable subscription pricing, subscriber management, and Stripe/PayPal recurring billing all work. We've built subscription businesses on WooCommerce that handle hundreds of renewals per day reliably.

WooCommerce itself doesn't store card numbers — that's handled by your payment gateway (Stripe, Razorpay, etc.) who are PCI compliant. What needs to be secured is WordPress itself: updated core and plugins, strong admin passwords, brute-force protection, and SSL. We deliver every store with security hardening done properly, and we're happy to maintain it monthly.

Yes — products (including variants and images), customers, order history, blog posts, and discount codes all migrate. The main consideration is that Shopify's subscription billing (if you use Shopify Subscriptions) needs to be recreated in WooCommerce Subscriptions with customer re-authentication for future payments. We'll map out every migration detail before you commit.