What Your E-Commerce Platform Really Costs: Shopify, WooCommerce, Marketplaces and Kappal, Compared Honestly

The headline price is never the price. A line-by-line comparison of Shopify, WooCommerce, the marketplaces and Kappal E-Commerce, and what each one really charges as your store grows.

All prices, fees and rates in this post are as of 19 August 2026 and change over time. Verify on the provider's own page before quoting.

The short version

Every e-commerce platform advertises a monthly price. Almost none of them tell you what you will actually pay, because the actual price is the headline price plus the transaction fee you did not notice, the app you cannot avoid, the staff seat you outgrew, the POS add-on you did not expect, and the migration bill you will pay the day you leave. This post runs the numbers on the famous options: Shopify, WooCommerce, the marketplaces, and Kappal E-Commerce. It lists the hidden charges each model carries, shows what each platform costs at ₹5 lakh, ₹10 lakh and ₹25 lakh of monthly sales, and names the value adds that never appear on a pricing page. If you are deciding where to sell online, this is the comparison nobody hands you before you sign.

For the decision framework behind these numbers, our companion guide, How to Choose an E-Commerce Platform That Grows With You, covers the models and the questions to ask. This post is the ledger.

1. The price on the website is the down payment

Here is the sentence that explains most e-commerce billing surprises: platforms price their entry point to win the sign-up, and price their growth to make the margin. The two numbers are deliberately different things.

A store on Shopify Basic sees ₹1,499 a month on yearly billing (₹1,994 billed monthly). The store also pays a 2% transaction fee on every sale processed through a third-party gateway like Razorpay, it gets 10 inventory locations, and its B2B catalogues are capped. A store on Shopify Plus sees a starting price near ₹1,75,000 a month. Between those two numbers sits the entire growth story of a small business, and every step of that story is paid for twice: once in the plan, and once in fees that scale with sales. One fairness note shapes every table in this post: Kappal's plans sit a feature level above Shopify's entry tiers. Kappal Sailor includes unlimited staff seats, multi-currency and multi-region, marketplace selling and advanced analytics — capabilities Shopify reserves for its Advanced tier or above. So this post compares Kappal against the Shopify tier that actually matches its features, and says plainly when a cheaper tier is a thinner product.

The same pattern repeats across models. WooCommerce advertises a free core and charges you in hosting, plugins, developer hours and your own security work. The marketplaces advertise no setup cost and take a cut of nearly everything you sell. A custom build quotes a price today and a maintenance bill forever. None of these models is dishonest. Each one simply prices the thing the platform controls and lets the other costs land on your desk.

The only fair way to compare them is to build a ledger: the entry price, then every fee that appears as the business grows. That is what this post does.

2. Five ways to sell online, one ledger

Each row below is a real commercial structure you can check on the provider's own pricing page today. Figures are published structures current as of 19 August 2026 and change over time; the point is the shape of the cost, not the last rupee.

One more Kappal tier worth naming before the ledger begins: above the published business plans (Surfer, Sailor, Captain), the same platform is offered as an Enterprise plan or a custom in-house deployment for high-volume retailers and brands — custom storefront, dedicated support, advanced analytics and migration assistance, quoted on scope.

3. The hidden charges, line by line

This is the table that matters. It is the list of charges that do not appear in the first screenshot of a pricing page, and that a merchant only discovers after the second or third month.

Two patterns in that table are worth naming. First, on a subscription platform the fees cluster at the point of success: more sales means more transaction fees, more staff means a higher tier, more locations means a higher tier, more countries means paid apps or a higher tier. The business is charged for growing. Second, on Kappal the same list is mostly empty by design: no transaction fee, no seat or location charges, no app-store subscriptions — the features are built in. The two honest exceptions are stated plainly rather than hidden: B2B is on the Captain plan (and higher), and non-standard custom development and full data migration are quoted as one-time services, exactly as the pricing page says.

4. Run the numbers: the same store, four platforms, three stages

Take a real Indian store doing ₹5 lakh, then ₹10 lakh, then ₹25 lakh of monthly sales, paying its payment gateway directly in every case. The table below is the platform fee only: subscription, transaction fees and apps. Gateway and shipping provider fees are separate and are paid in every model, so they cancel out of the comparison — as does the one-time setup cost, which every option carries and which this post excludes for every option equally (see the ROI calculator in section 4a).

Platform fees only, as of 19 August 2026. Read the Shopify columns fairly: Kappal Sailor's feature set — unlimited staff seats, marketplace selling and advanced analytics, which Shopify reserves for its Advanced tier or above — is why the like-for-like comparison is Shopify Advanced, not Basic or Grow. Basic caps staff (2 accounts), inventory locations (10) and marketplace order sync, and its B2B catalogues are capped; Grow caps staff at 5. Multi-currency and multi-region sit on every Shopify plan, so they are not the differentiator here. Basic and Grow are shown for context only. Shopify columns assume the common Indian setup of a third-party gateway (Razorpay at its published flat ~2% per transaction, collected by the gateway; PayU and Stripe sit in the same ~2-3% band); using Shopify Payments instead replaces that line with Shopify's own processing rate, similar in total. WooCommerce figures include hosting plus a bare-minimum plugin stack and are indicative typical ranges from public cost structures, not exact quotes. Kappal plan prices include the full feature set; Shopify prices are plan prices before tax and exclude apps. Figures change over time; verify before quoting.

Read the columns on their own terms. Kappal Sailor's headline plan price (₹8,500) is higher than Shopify Basic's (₹1,499) — because Basic is a thinner product with capped staff, inventory locations and B2B catalogues, while Sailor matches Shopify Advanced. That is exactly why the fair comparison is against Advanced, the tier whose features Sailor actually delivers: at ₹5 lakh of monthly sales the like-for-like cost is ~₹25,700 on Shopify against ₹8,500 on Kappal; at ₹25 lakh it is ~₹37,700 against ₹8,500, before tax and before apps. Even against the entry tier the all-in comparison is not what the headline suggests: Basic's 2% transaction fee brings it to ~₹11,500 at ₹5 lakh of sales, against Kappal's ₹8,500. The divergence is not a feature difference. It is the pricing model: one bill grows with the resources the store actually consumes, the others grow with the revenue the store earns.

The marketplace column deserves its own note. A marketplace is a distribution channel, not a store you own, and its cost is the most aggressive of all: referral fees, closing fees, shipping fees and advertising on top, which is why the "free to list" pitch is the most expensive option in this table for any store with serious volume. The store does not even keep the customer relationship. That is a separate conversation, which our guide to the MSME brand discovery gap covers; here the point is purely arithmetic.

4a. One-time setup cost, and an ROI calculator that is fair to every option

Every option in this post has a one-time setup or implementation cost — and Kappal is no exception. A Kappal store carries a one-time setup fee quoted on the store's complexity: catalogue size, design work, integrations and any migration scope. Shopify stores typically pay an agency for theme and app setup; WooCommerce stores pay a developer to build and configure the stack; a marketplace listing is fast to start but the store is never really yours; a custom build is mostly upfront.

A comparison that adds a setup cost to one option and not the others is not a comparison. The fair rule: include the setup cost for every option, or for none. Every recurring table in this post excludes setup for all options equally, so no platform is advantaged.

The ROI calculator — year-one total cost

$$ \text{Year-one total} = \text{one-time setup} + 12 \times (\text{monthly platform fee} + \text{recurring apps/plugins} + \text{gateway fees}) $$

Year-one recurring platform cost, by monthly sales level — 12 × the monthly figures from Section 4, with setup excluded equally for all options:

One-time setup cost — add to every column equally, or to none:

Setup figures are indicative for Shopify and WooCommerce and quoted on scope for Kappal — plug your own quotes into the formula, and add them to every column or to none. If the setup quotes differ across options, add the difference to the cheaper-to-set-up option's column and compare the year-one totals.

To use the calculator: take your actual setup quote from each provider (or zero for all), multiply your monthly platform fee, apps and gateway fees by twelve, add them, and compare year-one totals at your expected sales level. Because Kappal's monthly fee is flat while the subscription models' fees scale with sales, the gap only widens in year two — and the setup cost, whatever it is, is paid once.

5. The value adds that never make it to a pricing page

A pricing page lists the plan and the limits. It does not list what is included that other platforms charge for. That is where the real comparison lives, and it is where Kappal E-Commerce was designed to win.

The row worth re-reading is B2B. On the subscription model, selling wholesale is a higher tier or a suite of paid apps. On WooCommerce it is a stack of plugins you assemble and maintain. On a marketplace it does not exist as a store capability. On Kappal it is built in on the Captain plan (and higher): company accounts with roles, per-customer price lists, quote requests, approval workflows, purchase lists and bulk ordering. The honest note: B2B is not on the entry-level Surfer plan, so a store that needs wholesale from day one should plan for the tier that carries it. For any business that sells retail today and wholesale tomorrow, which is a large share of Indian MSMEs, that single row can save more than the platform fee in a month.

6. Flexibility has a price tag, and most platforms bill it per workaround

Every business eventually needs something the template does not do. The difference between platforms is not whether the need appears. It is what the need costs when it does. On a locked-down platform, each business rule becomes a paid app, a higher tier, a developer contract, or a change to the business process itself. The phrase that should worry a founder is "the platform does not support that, so we do it this way." Every workaround is a recurring charge wearing a spreadsheet.

Now add the cost of those apps together. One app at ₹1,000 a month sounds harmless. Five apps, plus the tier you need to run them, plus the transaction fee that scales with the sales those apps help you make, and the platform quietly becomes one of the store's largest cost lines. The architectural reason this happens, that most platforms are configured rather than built for a particular business, is explained in our companion guide. The pricing consequence is simple: flexibility is not a feature on those platforms, it is a series of monthly fees. On Kappal, the standard business rules are handled on the API-first core instead of sold as workarounds; a requirement that is non-standard, or reusable across other stores, or specific to a single store — as Kappal deems it — is quoted as a one-time development cost before work starts, exactly as the pricing page states: "any additional customisations are quoted separately."

7. Why Kappal E-Commerce exists

None of this started as a product plan. It started as the same conversation, over and over, with clients who needed things the famous platforms could not do. A marketplace business needed multiple sellers on one storefront, with per-vendor catalogues, orders and payouts; the standard answer was a separate marketplace product or a second system stitched on. A subscription brand needed recurring billing with pause-and-modify controls; the standard answer was another app charging its own monthly fee on top of the plan. A manufacturer needed different prices for different customers, quotes and approvals; the standard answer was a second system or a higher-tier upsell.

Kappal had been building custom software for businesses like these for years, so we did what a pragmatic engineering team does: we built the platform those businesses needed, on a proven, modern, API-first commerce foundation that powers thousands of stores globally, white-labelled and customized for each client. And because the pricing models we kept seeing punished the exact businesses we were trying to help, we priced it differently. The platform is priced by what a store actually consumes, hardware and network bandwidth, with 0% commission, no feature gating and no hidden add-ons. The bill moves when usage moves, never as a percentage of sales.

That is the need Kappal E-Commerce exists to fill: an Indian MSME can now get a complete, enterprise-grade store, B2B available on the plans that carry it, customized to its own rules, with a recurring price that stays flat while the business succeeds and a one-time setup cost quoted up front. Not a template that asks the business to fit in. Not a commission that grows with every order. Not an IT project the business has to run itself.

8. The honest trade-offs

Transparency cuts both ways, so the straight answers. Kappal's ecosystem of third-party apps is younger than the largest app stores, so a niche app may not exist yet; in that case Kappal builds the integration, because the platform is designed for it — with a one-time development cost quoted when the requirement is non-standard or specific to a single store. For a business that wants no managed service at all, open-source DIY remains cheaper in headline terms, before you count your own time, your own security work and your own breakage. And a merchant deeply invested in a mature app ecosystem will have integrations to reproduce — which is exactly what Kappal's migration assistance is for, with the full migration scoped and quoted as a one-time service based on store size and complexity. Finally, every Kappal store carries a one-time setup cost quoted on scope; every other option here has a setup or implementation cost too, so include setup for all options or for none when you compare.

The arithmetic, though, does not move. At scale, the subscription models charge the store a growing share of its own revenue for the same features. The marketplaces charge the most of all. The DIY stack charges in time and risk. Kappal E-Commerce charges for what the store actually uses, includes the full feature set instead of charging per feature, and puts the customization work on the platform instead of the business. Plans start at ₹4,000 a month (Surfer), billed quarterly and cancellable anytime, with a one-time setup cost quoted on store complexity and a 15-day free trial; onboarding includes migration assistance, with full data migration quoted as a one-time service. The comparison in this post, as of 19 August 2026, is best verified on your own store, with your own catalogue and your own numbers, before you sign anywhere.

We built Kappal E-Commerce because we kept watching good businesses pay a growing share of their profit to platforms that punished their success. The price on the website was never the price. Now there is a platform where it is.

About Kappal Software

Kappal Software Private Limited (kappal.in) is a boutique software company building custom applications, AI/ML solutions, cloud infrastructure and e-commerce platforms for businesses across AgriTech, FinTech, e-commerce and manufacturing. Our tagline is "Engineered for Efficiency", and we mean it literally: we build systems that remove friction from operations that already work, rather than asking clients to rebuild what they have. Kappal E-Commerce is available at ecommerce.kappal.in. For more on this work, visit kappal.in or write to us through the contact page.

References and sources

• Shopify India pricing page, plan and fee structures current as of 19 August 2026 (shopify.com/in/pricing): Basic ₹1,499/mo yearly, Grow ₹5,599/mo, Advanced ₹22,680/mo, Plus from ₹1,75,000/mo; third-party payment provider fees of 2%, 1%, 0.6% and 0.2% by tier; POS Pro at +₹7,000/mo per location; marketplace order sync capped near ₹8,000 a month. Setup for a Shopify store (theme, apps, design) is typically quoted by an agency and is additional.
• Kappal E-Commerce published plans (ecommerce.kappal.in), current as of 19 August 2026: Surfer ₹4,000/mo, Sailor ₹8,500/mo, Captain ₹18,000/mo, billed quarterly, 0% commission, ₹1/GB data overage, 15-day free trial. A one-time setup cost is quoted on store complexity; B2B is built in on the Captain plan (and higher) and is not on the entry Surfer plan; "any additional customisations are quoted separately" per the pricing page.
• Payment gateway fees: Razorpay (Kappal's primary pre-built gateway) publishes a flat ~2% per successful domestic transaction, ₹0 setup, collected by Razorpay directly; PayU and Stripe sit in the same ~2-3% band. Kappal adds no markup.
• WooCommerce figures include hosting plus a bare-minimum plugin stack (security, backups, SEO, shipping, gateway, accounting) and are indicative ranges drawn from publicly documented cost structures; exact amounts vary by provider, plan and category and change over time. Verify before quoting.