What an online store in India actually costs to run

A store's running cost is not one number but a set of lines that behave differently. The domain is annual. The platform or hosting is monthly or annual. The payment gateway charges per transaction. Apps and plugins are monthly and tend to accumulate quietly. Shipping and packaging are per order. And somebody's time is the largest line that never appears on any invoice.

One item that belongs on most published lists and no longer belongs on yours is the SSL certificate. Automatically issued certificates are now free and standard, and every mainstream hosted platform and most hosting plans provision and renew one without being asked. Paid certificates still exist for organisations that need extended validation, and a small store is not that case. If a proposal quotes you an annual SSL fee, ask what it is for.

The practical reason to separate these lines is that they scale differently. Two of them are fixed regardless of how much you sell, and one of them grows in direct proportion to sales. That difference decides more about your cost structure than any individual price does.

A platform subscription is a fixed cost: the same amount whether you sell nothing or a great deal. A payment gateway is a variable cost: a percentage of everything you sell. The two therefore trade places as you grow, and this is arithmetic rather than opinion.

At low monthly sales the fixed cost dominates. A platform fee that is a small percentage of a large business is a large percentage of a small one, and the gateway's percentage is almost irrelevant because it is a percentage of very little. At that stage the question worth asking is how to reduce fixed monthly commitments.

At higher sales the position inverts. The fixed fee becomes a rounding error and the gateway percentage becomes one of your largest controllable costs, at which point a fraction of a percent is worth negotiating and the platform fee is not worth the meeting.

This is why 'which platform is cheapest' has no general answer. It has an answer for a specific monthly sales figure, and the answer changes as that figure changes — which also means the right choice today can become the wrong one without anything going wrong.

A hosted platform charges a monthly fee and includes the things that would otherwise be your problem: updates, security patching, capacity when traffic spikes, and the certificate. You give up control and you may face additional transaction charges if you use a payment provider other than the platform's own — a term worth reading closely, because it can exceed the subscription.

Self-hosted software is free to licence and is not free to run. You pay for hosting, and you pay in maintenance: core and plugin updates, backups you have verified can actually be restored, security patching, and the afternoons when an update breaks the checkout. That labour is either your hours or an invoice from somebody.

The comparison that misleads people sets a monthly platform fee against the word 'free' and stops there. The honest comparison sets the platform fee against hosting plus a realistic maintenance figure — and for a business where nobody has the skills or the appetite for that maintenance, the hosted option is frequently cheaper in total even when it looks more expensive per month.

The headline percentage is one component among several. A full gateway cost has: a percentage that varies by payment instrument, sometimes a fixed amount per transaction, GST at 18% charged on the fee itself, possible setup and annual maintenance charges, a fee for processing refunds, a charge when a customer disputes a transaction, and in some arrangements a settlement or payout fee.

Two structural points matter more than the headline rate. First, the fee is calculated on the gross amount collected — which includes the shipping you charged and the GST you collected on behalf of the government. You pay a percentage on money that was never your revenue, so the effective bite measured against your own margin is larger than the quoted rate suggests.

Second, the settlement cycle is a cost even though it is not a fee. Money collected on Monday and settled to your bank several working days later is money you have earned and cannot use to restock. For a business with thin margins and fast inventory turnover, that delay can matter more than a small difference in percentage.

The arithmetic below uses a round 2% gateway rate and a ₹2,000 monthly platform fee. Both are illustrative figures chosen to show the shape of the result — every provider publishes its own current schedule and rates vary by business category and by negotiation, so run this with your own quoted numbers rather than these.

At ₹50,000 of monthly sales: the gateway takes ₹1,000, plus 18% GST on that fee, giving ₹1,180. Add the ₹2,000 platform fee and the total is ₹3,180 — about 6.4% of revenue.

At ₹5,00,000 of monthly sales: the gateway takes ₹10,000 plus GST, giving ₹11,800. The platform fee is unchanged at ₹2,000, so the total is ₹13,800 — about 2.8% of revenue.

The same platform costs less than half as much proportionally at the higher figure, without changing price. And the gateway has gone from being a third of the bill to being most of it. That is the whole argument for revisiting both decisions as the business grows, rather than treating the original choice as settled.

Domain renewal is the classic one. The first year is frequently promotional and the renewal is at standard price, which can be several times higher. It arrives twelve months later, when nobody remembers what was paid originally.

Theme and plugin licences renew annually too, and they usually renew for support and updates rather than for the software continuing to work — which makes them easy to let lapse and expensive to have lapsed when a security patch is needed. Apps are the quiet accumulator: each looks small, and a store running eight of them has a substantial monthly bill nobody decided on in one go.

Two larger items are specific to selling in India. Returns and undelivered cash-on-delivery orders carry real cost — forward freight, return freight, and packaging on an order that produced no revenue — and that cost scales with volume rather than being fixed. And migration: outgrowing a platform means moving products, content, URLs and order history, which is a project rather than a switch, and it is cheapest to anticipate before you are choosing under pressure.