Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Dukaan: the real monthly bill at 100, 1,000 and 5,000 orders

What does each platform cost on paper?

The line Indian founders under-read is Shopify’s transaction fee. Shopify Payments is not available to Indian merchants as of August 2026, so the “third-party gateway” fee applies to essentially every online order — 2% on Basic on top of your payment gateway’s own ~2% MDR. Dukaan’s service fee works the same way: a platform percentage stacked over gateway charges. WooCommerce is the only one of the three with no platform percentage at all — which is exactly why its true cost hides somewhere else.

What do the percentages do at real volume?

Percentage fees are a silent partner in your GMV. On Shopify Basic, ₹8 lakh of monthly sales pays ₹16,000 in transaction fees — eight times the subscription. That also produces a crossover worth knowing: upgrading from Basic (2%) to Grow (1%) pays for itself once 1% of your GMV exceeds the plan-price gap, which on monthly billing is at roughly ₹5.5 lakh of monthly online sales. The same arithmetic says Advanced’s 0.6% only beats Grow past roughly ₹55–60 lakh a month. Dukaan’s ₹200-per-order cap matters for high-AOV brands: above a ₹10,000 ticket on the Growth plan, the effective service fee falls below 2% and keeps falling. Run your own numbers before any plan upgrade — the platforms will not run them for you.

What is the bill at 100, 1,000 and 5,000 orders a month?

Illustrative monthly totals at ₹800 AOV, monthly billing, excluding GST, payment-gateway MDR (~2% everywhere) and ad spend. WooCommerce figures are realistic all-in ranges (hosting, plugins, maintenance) — the cash cost, not the founder-evenings cost.

Read the convergence, not the winner. At 1,000 orders a month all three land within a few thousand rupees of each other; at 5,000 they converge again. What differs is the shape of the cost: Shopify and Dukaan charge you a percentage of GMV forever, while WooCommerce converts that percentage into fixed costs — hosting and a developer — which is a good trade only if you actually have the developer. The honest tiebreaker is rarely the platform bill anyway: a 0.5-point conversion-rate gap between a fast, well-built store and a slow one moves more money at this scale than every fee on this table, which is why the conversion benchmarks matter more than the pricing pages.

What about apps, plugins and dev time?

The subscription is the visible cost; the stack is the real one. On Shopify, a working D2C stack — reviews, bundles, WhatsApp, loyalty, subscriptions — typically adds a dollar-denominated app bill that lands anywhere from a couple of thousand to ₹15,000+ a month as you scale; audit it quarterly, because zombie apps bill forever. On WooCommerce the equivalents are plugin licences (often annual, and they renew at full price) plus the update-and-conflict tax: someone has to test every WordPress, WooCommerce and plugin update, and that someone is a retained developer or an agency. Dukaan bundles its plugins into the plans — genuinely cheap, until the thing you need next does not exist in its catalogue and there is no third-party ecosystem to buy it from. Dev time prices the difference: Shopify theme tweaks are cheap and fast to iterate — which is exactly what CRO iteration speed depends on — WooCommerce gives you total control at salary cost, and Dukaan gives you a low ceiling at near-zero cost.

Platform fees are rent. Dev time is a salary. Percentages are a share of your GMV — know which one you are signing.

How painful is migration if I outgrow my choice?

Plan for it before you pick, because at least one migration is the base case for a growing brand. Catalogue and customer data move between all three; order history, reviews, app data and theme work largely do not. The expensive part is SEO: URL structures differ, so a proper 301 redirect map is non-negotiable, and even done well, expect a traffic wobble measured in weeks. Own your domain from day one — never a platform subdomain — and keep your product content in a spreadsheet-of-record so re-import is boring. Budget four to eight weeks of part-time effort for a real migration, more if your website is your primary channel and downtime is revenue.

Who should pick what in 2026?

• Dukaan: testing demand, WhatsApp-first selling, catalogue stores and lean single-founder operations. The percentage stings later, but ₹0–299 a month to validate a product is the right trade early.
• WooCommerce: brands with real dev capacity in-house or a trusted agency, content-and-SEO-heavy plays, and anyone who wants fees converted into fixed costs at scale. Free software, salaried reality.
• Shopify: the default for funded and scaling D2C for a reason — the ecosystem tax buys iteration speed, reliability and hiring ease. Watch the app bill and know your plan-crossover GMV.

We compared the three on checkout quality, ecosystem and hiring in the decision piece; this one is the invoice view. If you want the platform bill read against your whole growth P&L — fees, conversion, CAC and all — that is what a growth audit does.