Shopify or your own online store: how to decide

Shopify is very good at the common case:

• You can be selling within days: sign up, choose a theme, add products, connect a way to take payment
• Hosting, security and updates are handled for you
• An app store adds features such as reviews, subscriptions and shipping integrations without anyone writing code

If your catalogue is small, your checkout is ordinary and you are still finding out whether people will buy, that speed is worth a great deal. Start on Shopify. You can always move later, and you will know much more about your customers when you do.

Shopify is rented. You pay a monthly subscription for as long as the store is open, and most paid apps add a monthly fee of their own. Depending on your plan and your country, Shopify may also charge its own fee on each order taken through a third-party payment gateway, on top of that gateway's charge.

Check Shopify's current plans page before you decide rather than trusting figures in an article, including this one: the numbers change. Then add up what you would pay over three years, apps included.

The store also lives inside Shopify's rules: its checkout, its data and what its apps are allowed to do. For most shops that is fine. It stops being fine when the way you sell does not fit the template.

A store built for you trades a longer start for a different kind of control:

• The code is yours. There is no platform subscription, only the build and a yearly running cost
• The customer relationship is yours: accounts, order history and messages live in your own database
• Indian buying habits are built in rather than bolted on: UPI, cards, net banking and cash on delivery at checkout, with order confirmations on WhatsApp
• You can sell the way you actually sell, not the way a template assumes

Rynco Orchids is the example we know best. The nursery sells retail, wholesale, for export and as corporate gifts: four kinds of buyer with four sets of expectations, served by one store with per-genus pages, care guides and an admin panel where the nursery manages its own products. Its order confirmations reach customers on WhatsApp, sent by the database itself, so a confirmation cannot be lost because a browser closed.

The trade-off is time. A custom store takes 4 to 6 weeks from the day we have your product list, photographs and delivery rules, not an afternoon.

Answer these honestly and the choice usually makes itself:

• Do you need to be selling this month? Start on Shopify.
• Is your checkout ordinary: add to cart, pay, ship? Shopify handles that well.
• Do most of your customers pay by UPI or cash on delivery and expect confirmations on WhatsApp? A custom store is built around that.
• Do you sell to different kinds of buyer, such as retail, wholesale and corporate, with different rules? That is where templates start to fight you.
• Would you be paying for several apps every month to make a template behave? Add those fees up over three years.
• Does it matter that you own the code and the customer data outright? Only your own store gives you that.

A standard online store from CODKRAFTERS is ₹40,000, with the first year of hosting, security, daily backups, bug fixes and support included. From the second year it is ₹10,000 a year.

The payment gateway takes about 2% per order and the domain is roughly ₹800 to ₹1,500 a year in your name. Neither is billed by us, and we take no percentage of your sales. We are not registered for GST, so nothing is added on top.

Our Shopify work was an app rather than a store: the try-on widget for PIDY, which loads inside merchants' storefronts. Its whole design came from one constraint. The code placed in a shop had to stay under five kilobytes, because it would run on thousands of stores that nobody can debug one by one, so everything heavy runs on PIDY's own domain and nothing loads until a shopper clicks.

That is the Shopify trade in miniature. The platform is excellent at the common case, and anything outside it has to be squeezed through a narrow door.

Tell us what you sell, who buys it and how they pay. If Shopify is the better answer for you, we will say so. If it is not, you get one fixed price for your own store before anything starts.