The short answer: if you are testing a product and need to be selling next week, start on Shopify. If your catalogue does not fit a template, your monthly app bill keeps growing, or you want full control over checkout and the customer experience, a custom-built store starts to make more sense.
We build custom stores for a living, so take this with that in mind — but we also tell people on the first call when Shopify is the better answer for them, because it often is. Here is how to think it through.
What Shopify gets right
Shopify is genuinely good at the thing most new brands need most: getting a working, trustworthy store online quickly, without anyone having to think about servers.
- Speed to launch. Pick a theme, add products, connect a payment gateway, and you can be taking orders in days.
- Hosting, security and uptime are handled. You never patch a server or renew a certificate.
- A huge app ecosystem. Reviews, WhatsApp buttons, cash-on-delivery rules, subscriptions, upsells — someone has built an app for almost everything.
- Easy to hand to a team. The admin is familiar to a lot of people, so hiring someone to run it is easier.
For a brand that is still finding out whether the product sells, those are exactly the right priorities.
Where the costs creep in
Shopify’s headline plan price is rarely what a growing store actually pays. The bill tends to grow in three places:
- Apps. Each one is reasonable on its own. Together — reviews, COD controls, WhatsApp notifications, bundles, a better search, a loyalty programme — they become a second monthly subscription, and some charge more as your order volume grows.
- Transaction fees. Most Indian stores take payments through a gateway like Razorpay, Cashfree or PayU. Depending on your plan, Shopify can charge its own fee on top of the gateway’s when you do not use its in-house payments. Check the current rates for your plan before you compare — they change, and they matter at scale.
- Theme work. The moment you want the store to do something the theme was not designed for, you are paying a developer to work around it, inside someone else’s constraints.
None of this makes Shopify a bad choice. It means the right comparison is the total yearly cost at the size you expect to be, not the plan price on the pricing page.
Where a template fights the product
Templates assume a catalogue that looks like most catalogues: products with a few variants and a stock count. That breaks down faster than you might expect.
- Made-to-order and one-off pieces. Handmade products, custom sizes, or items that exist exactly once do not sit comfortably in a stock-count model.
- Unusual pricing. Trade prices for some customers, bundles that change by season, pricing that depends on a measurement.
- Checkout rules. Cash on delivery only in some pincodes, only under a certain order value, or only for returning customers.
- Your own process. If orders need to reach a workshop, a warehouse sheet or a WhatsApp group in a particular shape, a custom store can simply do that.
When most of your “Shopify work” is fighting the platform, that is the signal.
What a custom store actually changes
A custom store is software written for your brand, running on your own accounts. In practice that means:
- Higher cost up front, lower cost to run. You pay for the build once. There are no per-app subscriptions, and the running costs are hosting and a payment gateway fee.
- Checkout exactly as you want it. The steps, the payment options, the rules — all of it designed around your customers rather than a theme’s defaults.
- Your data in your own database. Orders, customers and reviews live somewhere you control and can query, export or connect to anything.
- Someone has to look after it. Updates, security and the occasional fix are on you — or on whoever you pay for care. This is the real trade-off, and anyone who does not mention it is not being straight with you.
A simple way to decide
| Your situation | Probably start with |
|---|---|
| Testing a product, fewer than a handful of SKUs | Shopify |
| Standard catalogue, no unusual rules, small team | Shopify |
| Monthly apps and fees are adding up to real money | Worth pricing a custom store |
| Made-to-order, one-offs, or unusual pricing | Custom |
| Checkout or fulfilment needs its own rules | Custom |
| You want the store tied into other systems you run | Custom |
It is also fine to do both, in order. Plenty of brands launch on Shopify, learn what sells and how they fulfil, and move to a custom store once they know exactly what it needs to do. That is often the cheapest path, because by then the requirements are real rather than guessed.
Questions to ask whoever builds it
Whichever way you go, the same questions protect you:
- Is the payment gateway in my business’s name? Payouts should go straight to your account, never through the developer’s.
- Are the domain, hosting and store accounts mine? Registered to your email, with you as the owner and the developer added as a user.
- Can I export everything? Products, customers and orders, in a format another developer could use.
- What happens to search if I move later? Moving platforms without redirecting old product URLs throws away the search traffic they built up. Ask how that would be handled.
- Who looks after it, and what does that cost? For a custom store especially, get the aftercare in writing.
Where we come in
We build custom stores — you can see two of them, a clinical skincare range and a handmade crochet label, on our work page, both live. If you tell us what you sell and how you fulfil it, we will tell you honestly which route we would take in your position, even if the answer is “Shopify, for now”.