Shopify Customer Services

On annual billing, Shopify's India pricing as of 29 July 2026 is ₹1,499 per month for Basic, ₹5,599 for Grow and ₹22,680 for Advanced, with Plus starting from ₹1,75,000 — all before 18% GST, and monthly billing costs more than annual. That subscription is only part of the cost. Because Shopify Payments has not launched in India, you will use a domestic gateway such as Razorpay, PayU or Cashfree, which charges its own rate — Razorpay publishes 2% plus GST as standard for domestic cards, UPI, net banking and wallets — and Shopify adds a third-party transaction fee of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced or 0.2% on Plus. Budget for the subscription, the gateway rate, Shopify's transaction fee, any paid apps, and a one-time theme purchase if you buy one.

No. As of 29 July 2026 Shopify Payments has not launched in India, and Shopify's India pricing page still lists a third-party payment provider fee for every plan, which is what you pay when Shopify Payments is unavailable or unused. Practically this means every Indian Shopify merchant integrates a domestic gateway and pays two fees per order: the gateway's rate and Shopify's transaction fee. Since Shopify occasionally expands Shopify Payments to new countries, it is worth re-checking at signup — but plan your budget on the two-fee assumption.

A free Shopify theme is a legitimate starting point. Shopify maintains its free themes directly, they are built on Online Store 2.0, and they receive regular updates — which is more than can be said for some paid themes from small studios. Paid Theme Store themes are a one-time purchase, generally in the US$140–500 range, and mostly buy you pre-built sections and layout variety rather than better performance. Our advice is to decide the design direction first and then pick the theme closest to it, free or paid. Buying a premium theme and then paying a developer to undo its defaults is the most common way brands waste money at this stage.

Almost always because of what has been added to the storefront rather than the storefront itself. Shopify's hosting and CDN are fast; the slowdown comes from app JavaScript — reviews, upsells, popups, wishlists, chat, currency switchers, multiple analytics tags — loading on every page whether or not the feature is used there. Oversized hero images and leftover code from apps that were uninstalled months ago add to it. A speed audit should start with an app inventory and a check for orphaned script tags and theme snippets, then move to image formats and sizes, and only then to theme code. We measure against Google's Core Web Vitals rather than a single composite score, because that is what Google actually uses.

It can, and whether it does comes down to redirect planning. Shopify enforces its own URL patterns — /products/, /collections/, /pages/ — so if you are coming from WooCommerce or Magento, essentially every URL changes. Products, customers and order history migrate reliably; search equity only survives if a complete old-to-new 301 redirect map is written and crawl-tested before the DNS switch, with titles, meta descriptions and image alt text carried across. Expect some short-term fluctuation even on a clean migration while Google recrawls. The migrations that lose rankings permanently are the ones where redirects were treated as post-launch cleanup.

Only within limits, and the limits depend on your plan. Shopify's checkout is deliberately standardised — it is one of the platform's real advantages, since it is tested at a scale no individual store could match — and Shopify's own plan comparison lists checkout customisation as "limited" on Basic, Grow and Advanced, with full customisation on Plus. In practice most checkout-stage losses can be addressed before checkout anyway: showing shipping costs on the product page, giving delivery estimates earlier, and offering the payment methods your customers actually use, which in India means UPI and often cash on delivery. If your business genuinely requires bespoke checkout logic, that is a Plus conversation and we will say so early.

Shopify's support handles platform questions well — billing, account settings, how a native feature works, whether something is possible. What it does not do is work inside your theme or your app stack. It will not debug a Liquid template a previous developer edited, identify which of your apps is adding two seconds to the product page, resolve a conflict between two apps fighting over the cart, apply theme updates without breaking your customised sections, or advise whether a requirement should be an app, a theme section or a private app. That is the gap our maintenance retainer covers, alongside staged updates, backups and Core Web Vitals monitoring.

Typical ranges from past projects: two to three weeks for a straightforward store setup, three to six weeks for custom design, three to five weeks for a migration, and four to seven for a redesign. Custom development varies widely with scope. The single biggest factor in whether those ranges hold is how quickly we get your material — product data in a usable spreadsheet, images, brand assets, copy, gateway and courier account access, and timely feedback at each approval point. Projects that slip almost always slip waiting on content or sign-off, which is why the scope document names who owns each input.

Yes. We have delivered Shopify work for clients in India, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the UAE and Australia. For stores based outside India, Shopify Payments is generally available and the two-fee structure described on this page does not apply — you would pay Shopify Payments' processing rate instead, which varies by country and card type. Time-zone overlap is arranged at the start of the engagement, and the response commitment stays the same.