Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Dukaan: pick the store you can grow on, not the cheapest month one

The decision in one paragraph

If ad-driven growth is the plan, Shopify is the default for a reason: the most reliable checkout in Indian conditions, the deepest app and talent ecosystem, and infrastructure you never think about during a sale. WooCommerce wins when you have real technical capacity in-house and want ownership and flexibility without per-month platform rent — at the price of being your own DevOps. Dukaan and its peers in the made-for-India tier win on speed-to-launch and price for first-store, WhatsApp-first sellers — with ceilings you will meet if the brand works. The mistake is treating this as a features comparison; it is a question of what breaks at 3× your current volume and who fixes it.

Total cost of ownership: the honest maths

Sticker prices mislead in both directions. Shopify: the plan fee is the small part — India pricing starts modestly, but reality adds apps (₹8,000–25,000 a month is a normal stack by growth stage), theme work, and transaction economics via your own gateway. WooCommerce: "free" plus hosting (₹1,500–8,000/month for anything serious), plugins, SSL, backups, staging — and the real line item, developer hours: updates, conflicts, security and speed work that Shopify absorbs invisibly. A realistic Woo build with maintenance retainer often costs Shopify money without Shopify reliability. Dukaan-tier: genuinely cheap and fast to launch, with costs appearing later as feature ceilings — checkout customisation, app depth, integration options. Price the platform at your 12-month volume, not your launch volume.

The cheapest platform is the one that converts best on a mid-range Android on 4G — whatever its subscription says.

Checkout and speed: where the decision actually pays

Everything in our CRO work runs through the same gate: the checkout on a mid-range Android phone on 4G. Shopify's checkout is boringly excellent — fast, familiar, UPI-friendly via the major gateways, hard to break, and now customisable enough for trust badges and COD logic. WooCommerce checkouts are as good as the build — which means the median one is worse, slower under load, and one plugin update from a bad weekend; a disciplined build with a good gateway plugin can match Shopify, but discipline is the scarce input. Dukaan checkouts are clean and mobile-native by design, within tighter customisation limits. If paid traffic is your growth engine, checkout reliability is not a feature — it is the product you are buying.

Ecosystem and hiring: the constraint nobody prices

At some point you will need: a theme fix at 9pm before a sale, a WhatsApp API integration, a bundles app, a CRO developer, an agency that knows the stack. Shopify's ecosystem answers all of these in hours — the talent pool in India is deep, the app store has three options for everything, and every serious tool integrates natively. WooCommerce's ecosystem is vast but unvetted; hiring means evaluating developers, not picking from a marketplace. The India-first platforms have the thinnest benches — fine until the first complex requirement. For a founder whose scarce resource is attention, the ecosystem tax is usually the deciding argument.

Who should pick what: the honest matrix

• Pick Shopify if paid acquisition is core, you value reliability over control, and you want the hiring pool — i.e., most ad-driven D2C food, FMCG and wellness brands. (It is what the majority of the brands we scale run.)
• Pick WooCommerce if you have in-house technical strength, content/SEO is a major channel (WordPress's native edge), you need deep customisation, or platform rent offends the unit economics at your scale.
• Pick Dukaan-tier if you are validating: first store, WhatsApp-heavy selling, hyperlocal or single-city, minimal catalogue — with a planned migration path the day the brand proves.
• Migration note: moving up (Dukaan→Shopify, Woo→Shopify) is routine; plan URL redirects carefully so SEO equity survives — the redirect discipline in the launch playbook applies double at migration.