Three products, three failure modes
WooCommerce fails as cheap hosting plus 30 plugins. Shopify fails as a brochure stuffed into a store theme, or as app sprawl. Custom fails as an unpaid product team after the agency disappears.
Write the failure you cannot afford: downtime on Diwali, editor lock-out, or a checkout nobody can extend. That sentence picks the stack more honestly than a feature grid.
Who is on call at 11 p.m.
Shopify: Shopify plus your apps. WooCommerce: you and your host. Custom: you. If the answer is “the intern,” do not pick custom.
WooCommerce: one login, your servers, your upgrades
The win is editorial + catalogue in WordPress. The tax is PHP/hosting, caching, payment plugins, and a release process. We treat WooCommerce as engineering, not a checkbox on a business-site quote.
Indian payments exist; quality varies. Object cache, image discipline, and a staging site are part of the build — otherwise Core Web Vitals collapse. See speed and hosting for SMEs.
When WooCommerce is a gift
A publisher that sells a few courses or prints, already staffed for WordPress. A manufacturer with a PDF-heavy site that added 40 SKUs. Not a TikTok-born fashion label with no sysadmin.
Shopify: hosted checkout as the default Indian D2C OS
Inventory, apps, and a checkout you do not patch on Friday night. That is the product. Marketing pages are good enough. Use the Shopify setup checklist as the launch bar.
You pay rent and app fees. You gain a labour market of themes and specialists. For most Indian catalogue businesses this is cheaper than pretending WooCommerce is free.
Shopify is still the wrong brochure
Clinics, CA firms, and B2B services should not buy Shopify to “look modern.” They need a business website from ₹28,000 and maybe a booking tool.
Custom and headless: when the storefront is software
Next.js storefronts shine when you need design systems, complex templates, or to embed commerce in a product. Headless Shopify keeps checkout/apps and replaces the theme. Fully custom carts mean you own more of PCI-adjacent and reconciliation pain.
Staff this as software: repo, staging, monitoring. If you cannot name a maintainer, you are buying a souvenir.
Headless is not a prestige skin
If the only goal is a Framer-pretty homepage on top of Shopify, stay in Online Store 2.0. Headless for vanity is how LCP dies and content editors lose the CMS.
Indian payments, COD, and 3PLs on each door
Shopify’s app density for Shiprocket-class flows is the practical winner. WooCommerce can connect; you test every plugin upgrade. Custom means you write or buy connectors and own breakage.
COD verification is process. No stack removes RTO. Shopify makes holds and tags easier; custom can encode your exact rules if you will maintain them.
- UPI as default, not a badge
- Refunds that match the original rail
- 3PL or Shiprocket-class connector you can name
- GST invoice sample before go-live
Marketplace plus owned cart
Amazon/Flipkart plus an owned cart is normal. The owned cart still needs a real OS. Do not custom-build to “sync marketplaces” as phase one.
SEO and content: three different graphs
WooCommerce inherits WordPress blogging. Shopify collections and products are strong if IA is clean; the blog is adequate. Custom SEO is whatever you implement — including the chance to implement nothing.
Content-led acquisition with a side catalogue often stays WordPress + Shopify subdomain, or WooCommerce. Pure D2C paid+product SEO often stays Shopify. Technical bar: Core Web Vitals.
Do not buy custom for “SEO control” alone
Titles, canonicals, and speed are available on all three. Custom for SEO is justified when templates are highly programmatic and unique — not because someone hates Yoast.
Total cost in rupees over 24 months
Sum build + hosting or Shopify plan + apps + payment fees + developer hours + downtime risk. WooCommerce “₹15,000 all in” quotes omit the second year. Custom “from ₹50,000” omits the third engineer.
Brevia will quote Shopify from ₹38,000 OTP when that matches the job, and say no to a custom cart that is really a theme. Brochure work stays on business website pricing — see also website cost in India.
App fees versus salary
₹3,000–8,000/mo in Shopify apps can replace a coordinator. A custom integration that needs a developer every week is a salary. Count people, not only SaaS line items.
Migration paths that do not donate SEO
WooCommerce → Shopify and Wix → Woo/Shopify are rebuilds with redirect maps. Theme design does not travel. Budget IA and pixels again. Wix-specific: migrate from Wix to WordPress.
Shopify → headless can keep the product graph. Fully leaving Shopify means exporting customers, orders, and discount logic. Do it between seasons, not during a sale.
Redirects are the migration
A pretty new cart with 404s on old product URLs is an SEO and ads Quality Score gift to competitors. Canonicals and 301s are in the statement of work or the project is incomplete.
Decision rule we use on Chennai discovery calls
Orders-first, no host, festival date: Shopify. WordPress-native editors, modest SKUs: WooCommerce as an engineered website build. Checkout-as-product and a named maintainer: custom/Next.js.
If Instagram is the storefront today, read website vs Instagram Shop before you pay for any of the three. You may still need a cart; you may not need custom.
One question that ends the bake-off
“Who patches checkout if UPI fails on Saturday?” If the room goes quiet, you are not buying custom. Consult.
What Brevia will not build
A from-scratch cart for a 15-SKU homemade pickle brand. A WooCommerce install on ₹99 hosting. A headless rebuild to copy a Dribbble shot. We would rather sell a smaller Shopify package.
We will build custom when the brief is software: unique pricing, logged-in catalogues, or a design system shared with an app. That conversation starts with constraints, not a moodboard — how to brief an agency.
Bring numbers, not logos
SKU count, last-quarter GMV, return rate, and who edits. Logos in a slide are how you get the stack the vendor already staffed.
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