Hosted platform, open source, or custom build? A straight comparison of the trade-offs, plus the India-specific details — payments, GST and shipping — that decide it.
Choosing an e-commerce platform is a decision you live with for years. Migrating later means moving products, customers, order history and search rankings — expensive and risky. It's worth an afternoon of thought now.
Start with your constraints, not the platforms
Before comparing options, answer these. They eliminate most of the field.
- How many products, and how often does the catalogue change?
- Do you sell simple products, or variants across size, colour and material?
- Do you need to reflect an existing process — stock across locations, dealer pricing, made-to-order?
- Who updates the store day to day, and how technical are they?
- What are you spending monthly, including transaction fees?
The three broad options
Hosted platforms
Shopify and similar. You rent the software, they handle hosting, security and updates.
Best for getting to market quickly with a standard catalogue. The trade-offs are a monthly fee that grows with your plan, limits on how far you can customise checkout, and a dependence on paid apps for functionality outside the core — app costs add up faster than most people expect.
Open-source platforms
WooCommerce, Medusa and similar. The software is free; you pay for hosting and for someone to maintain it.
Best when you need real control and want to avoid per-transaction platform fees. The trade-off is that maintenance is genuinely yours: updates, security patches, backups, and performance tuning as the catalogue grows.
Custom build
A store built specifically for your business.
This is rarely the right answer for a straightforward catalogue, and clearly the right answer when your selling process doesn't fit standard e-commerce — B2B pricing tiers, complex configurators, deep integration with existing inventory or ERP systems. Highest cost, highest control.
The India-specific details
These matter more than the platform comparison charts suggest, and they're where generic international advice falls down.
Payments
Indian customers expect UPI. A checkout without it will lose sales, regardless of how good the rest of the store is. You'll also want cards, net banking, and wallets. Razorpay, PayU and Cashfree are the common gateways — check which your chosen platform supports natively rather than through a fragile plugin.
Cash on delivery is still significant in many categories. If you plan to offer it, confirm your platform and courier both handle it properly, including reconciliation.
GST
Your invoices need to be GST-compliant, with correct tax rates per product category and proper handling of interstate versus intrastate transactions. Retrofitting this is painful. Confirm it works before you commit.
Shipping
Integration with Delhivery, Shiprocket, Blue Dart or similar saves hours every week once volume picks up. Manual courier booking is fine for five orders a day and untenable at fifty.
Serviceability by pincode matters too — customers should learn at checkout, not after paying, that you can't deliver to them.
Questions that reveal the real cost
- What is the total monthly cost at my expected volume, including transaction fees and apps?
- Can I export my full product and customer data if I leave?
- What happens to my URLs and SEO if I migrate later?
- Who is responsible for security updates?
- How fast does the storefront load with my actual catalogue size?
A reasonable default
For most businesses starting out in India with a straightforward catalogue, a hosted platform gets you selling fastest, and the monthly fee is cheaper than the engineering time you'd spend otherwise.
Move to open source or custom when a specific, concrete limitation is costing you money — not because custom sounds better. The right time to migrate is when you can name the exact thing your current platform won't do.
If you're weighing this up for your own catalogue and want a second opinion on the trade-offs, we're happy to talk it through.