Shopify Store Setup Checklist for India

Setting up a Shopify store in India is mostly straightforward, but a handful of India-specific decisions - payments, GST, shipping, and cash on delivery - trip up almost every first-timer. This checklist walks through the setup in order, flags the local gotchas, and gives realistic rupee costs so you know what you are signing up for.

First, is Shopify the right choice for you?

Shopify is the fastest way to launch a credible online store, and for most Indian small and mid-sized sellers it is a sensible default: it is hosted, secure, and you do not manage servers. Its trade-offs are a recurring subscription fee, transaction charges on top of your gateway's fee unless you qualify for exemptions, and less deep customisation than a custom store. If you sell a handful of products and want to be live this week, Shopify wins. If you have complex pricing, a huge catalogue, or want to avoid platform fees at scale, weigh the Shopify vs custom question and the known disadvantages of Shopify before committing. For a plain-English view of the platform itself, our Shopify glossary entry lays out the essentials.

Step 1 - Plan, domain, and the basics

Pick a plan (the entry "Basic" tier suits most new stores), then buy a domain. A .in or .com domain costs roughly ₹700-1,200 a year and signals you are a real business - do not launch on the free myshopify.com subdomain. Set your store currency to INR, your store address and time zone to India, and your weight and measurement units to metric. These sound trivial, but getting currency and address right from the start avoids tax and shipping headaches later, and they are fiddly to change once you have live orders.

Step 2 - Payments, the India specifics

This is where guides written for the US fall down. Shopify Payments is not available in India, so you cannot use Shopify's built-in gateway. Instead you connect an Indian payment gateway - Razorpay, Cashfree, PayU, CCAvenue, or Instamojo are the common choices. Razorpay and Cashfree integrate cleanly with Shopify and support UPI, cards, net banking, and wallets, which matters enormously because UPI is how a large share of Indian customers prefer to pay. Expect gateway fees around 2% per transaction (plus GST on that fee); rates vary by gateway and volume, so compare. You will need business documents - PAN, a bank account, and usually GST details - to activate a gateway, so start this early, as verification can take a few days. For the fuller picture, see accepting online payments in India.

Step 3 - GST and tax settings

If you are GST-registered (required once you cross the turnover threshold, and effectively expected for selling through most channels), configure tax correctly. Set your GSTIN in Shopify, decide whether your displayed prices include GST (most B2C stores show tax-inclusive prices, which Indian shoppers expect), and make sure invoices show the GST breakup. Shopify's native tax tools are built for other countries, so many Indian sellers add a GST invoicing app from the Shopify App Store to generate compliant invoices with HSN codes. This is one area worth getting right from day one, because fixing tax records retroactively is painful. We are not tax advisors - confirm your specific obligations with your CA.

Step 4 - Shipping, COD, and logistics

Two India realities shape your shipping setup. First, cash on delivery is still expected by a meaningful share of buyers, especially outside the metros, so decide whether to offer it - it lifts conversions but brings return-to-origin losses and cash-handling friction. Second, you will almost certainly use a courier aggregator like Shiprocket, Delhivery, or Pickrr rather than wiring up individual couriers; these plug into Shopify, compare rates, print labels, and handle COD remittance. Set realistic shipping charges or build them into product prices, define your serviceable pin codes, and state a clear delivery-timeline expectation. Factor return shipping into your margins from the start - returns are a cost of doing e-commerce in India, not an exception.

Step 5 - Products, theme, and trust

Add products with honest, specific descriptions and good photos - on a phone screen, images sell. Choose a clean theme (Shopify's free themes are genuinely good; you do not need a paid one to launch) and keep it fast. A heavy theme stuffed with apps will crawl on the mid-range Android phones most Indians shop on, so protect your page speed. Build trust visibly: show a reachable phone number and WhatsApp, display your return policy near the buy button, and add genuine reviews as they come - never fake them. Trust signals matter more in India than in markets with decades of online-shopping habit, because a first-time buyer is deciding whether you are a real, reachable business.

Step 6 - Legal pages and policies

Every Indian store needs a few pages before launch: a privacy policy (the DPDP Act applies to the personal data you collect), terms and conditions, a shipping policy, and a clear returns and refunds policy. Shopify can generate starting templates, but edit them to reflect what you actually do - a refund policy that does not match reality causes disputes and chargebacks. If you take payments, your gateway will also expect these pages to exist before it fully activates your account.

Step 7 - Pre-launch checks

Before you announce, place a real test order end to end: add to cart, check out, pay with a real method, and confirm you receive the order and the customer gets a confirmation. Test COD separately if you offer it. Check the store on an actual phone, not just your laptop. Confirm tax shows correctly on the invoice, shipping charges calculate as intended, and every policy link works. Set up web analytics and conversion tracking so you can see what happens from day one rather than guessing later.

Realistic rupee costs to run a store

Honest monthly maths for a new Indian store: the Shopify plan itself is the largest fixed cost (the Basic plan runs in the low thousands of rupees per month, cheaper when billed annually), a domain is ~₹1,000 a year, payment gateway fees are ~2% of revenue, courier costs are per shipment, and a few paid apps (GST invoicing, reviews) might add ₹500-2,000 a month combined. Setup is cheap if you do it yourself and costs more if you hire help: a professional Shopify setup - theme customisation, apps, payments, GST, and launch - typically lands somewhere in the ₹25,000-1,00,000+ band depending on how bespoke you want it, and a sense of total build cost is covered in how much an ecommerce website costs in India.

Shopify's appeal is that you can be selling within days, but the India-specific layer - an Indian payment gateway, GST invoicing, COD logistics, and visible trust-building - is what separates a store that merely launches from one that actually converts. Work through this checklist in order, test everything with a real transaction, and you will avoid the mistakes that send first-time sellers back to the drawing board. If you would rather hand the setup to a team, we are happy to scope it - see what it costs - or point you to the right approach for your catalogue.