Amazon to your own Shopify store in India (2026): real costs, margins and the first 6 steps

Moving from Amazon-only to your own Shopify store in India costs ₹1,994/mo for Shopify's Basic plan (₹1,499/mo billed yearly) plus a one-time build of roughly ₹1,50,000–₹4,00,000 for most sellers. In return you get the customer's email, pricing control and repeat orders you don't pay Amazon to win back. Keep Amazon for reach and run both channels.

If you sell only on Amazon, you're renting a business you don't own. Amazon keeps your customer data, sets the rules and fees, and can suspend a listing or an account with little warning.

I am a senior Shopify developer based in Delhi/NCR, and I have moved several Amazon-first Indian sellers onto their own D2C store — so I have seen both the real upside and the honest friction of doing it.

Why do Amazon sellers in India build their own store?

Amazon is a brilliant place to get discovered and a terrible place to build a brand. When your whole business lives inside Seller Central, three things are true, and none of them are in your favour.

You don't own the customer. Amazon deliberately hides your buyers' email addresses and contact details. You cannot email them, you cannot retarget them cleanly, and you cannot bring them back for a second purchase without paying Amazon again to reach them. The single most valuable asset in D2C — a customer list you can market to — is the one thing Amazon never gives you.

You don't own the margin. Between referral fees, FBA, storage, returns, and the ads you now have to run just to stay visible, a lot of sellers hand Amazon a big share of revenue by the time everything nets out. (Amazon cut referral fees to zero on products under ₹1,000 in 1,800+ categories from March 16, 2026, which helps low-priced catalogues; fulfilment and ad costs remain.) On your own store you pay a plan fee and payment fees, and keep the rest.

You don't own the rules. Amazon can change fee structures, suppress a listing, or suspend an account with limited recourse. If that is your only channel, one algorithm change or one policy dispute can take your whole revenue offline. An owned store is the insurance policy.

The brands that win in India today run both: Amazon for the reach and first-time discovery, and a Shopify store for margin, data, repeat purchases, and the brand itself. This isn't "leave Amazon." It's "stop being only on Amazon."

What do you actually gain with an owned store?

Here is the honest side-by-side, from an Indian seller's point of view.

The gap that matters most is the first row. Once buyers land on your store, their email and consent are yours — which is what makes email, WhatsApp commerce, and retargeting possible at all. That is the compounding asset Amazon structurally denies you.

Do the margins really work out better?

Usually yes, but the maths isn't automatic, because you trade Amazon's traffic for the job of driving your own. Here is a simplified look at a ₹1,500 product. I've used ₹1,500 on purpose: under ₹1,000, most Amazon.in categories now charge no referral fee at all, which shrinks the gap.

Figures are illustrative; your category, weight, return rate and ad efficiency move them a lot. On a cash-on-delivery order through Shopify's built-in COD method, Shopify charges no transaction fee and there's no gateway fee, but the courier's COD charge and a higher return rate take their place. But the shape holds: on Shopify you delete the referral fee and keep pricing power, and in exchange you own the customer-acquisition line. For a repeat-purchase product — supplements, skincare, coffee, pet, apparel basics — that trade is strongly worth it, because the second order costs you almost nothing when you already own the email. On Amazon you pay to reacquire the same customer every time.

If you want the full India cost picture beyond fees, the hidden costs of running a Shopify store and total monthly cost break down what actually leaves your account each month.

What does the Shopify platform cost in India?

Before any developer spend, here is the plan cost from shopify.com/in/pricing, checked on October 5, 2026. Prices are shown without tax, so check your invoice for GST. I keep the current numbers on my Shopify pricing in India page.

Shopify Payments isn't available in India, so every Indian store connects a third-party gateway such as Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree, PhonePe PG or CCAvenue. On prepaid orders you pay that gateway's own fee (Razorpay's standard rate is 2% plus 18% GST on the fee) and Shopify's fee from the table. Orders taken through Shopify's built-in Cash on Delivery method are manual payments, and Shopify charges no transaction fee on them. The Starter plan you may see advertised isn't available to new stores. Most Amazon sellers starting out belong on Basic. Grow pays for itself on fees alone once prepaid sales pass about ₹5,45,000 a month on monthly billing. Full detail is in Shopify pricing plans India.

How do you move your Amazon catalogue across?

This is where sellers expect a one-click button and there isn't one. Amazon gives you no clean export that maps to Shopify's structure. The move is real work, but most of it is content, not code.

1. Pull your listings. Export your active listings from Seller Central (category reports / inventory files). You'll get titles, ASINs, prices, and bullet points — not a Shopify-ready file.
2. Rewrite for your own store. Amazon titles are keyword-stuffed for Amazon search; on your store they should read like a brand. Rework titles, descriptions, and bullets into clean product copy.
3. Sort out images. Check that you own or have licence to the product photography you used on Amazon. Marketplace-optimised white-background shots work, but a D2C store converts far better with lifestyle imagery.
4. Build the CSV. Map everything into Shopify's product import format — handle, title, description, variants, price, SKU, inventory, tags. This is the step where a developer saves you days.
5. Import and QA. Load into Shopify, check variants, pricing, and inventory, and set up collections that match how customers browse, not how Amazon categorises.

The one thing that does not come with you is your customer list — Amazon keeps it. You rebuild that audience from day one on your own store, and every new order from here is an email you own. If you are also on other marketplaces, keeping stock in sync matters; that is the job of a Meesho/Flipkart/Amazon sync setup.

How is this different from a normal migration?

If you've read about Dukaan or WooCommerce migrations, this one has a different shape. A platform migration moves a whole store — customers, orders, redirects, SEO — from one storefront to another. Going from Amazon-only is not a migration of a store; it's the creation of a first store.

That changes the priorities:

• No 301 redirect problem. You aren't inheriting a domain with rankings, so there's nothing to redirect. You're building SEO from zero — which is freeing, not scary. Start it right with the fundamentals in Shopify SEO for D2C brands.
• Content and photography dominate the timeline, not data porting.
• Conversion is a new muscle. On Amazon, trust and traffic are borrowed. On your store you have to earn both — which means the storefront has to actually convert. If yours doesn't, why a store isn't converting is the checklist I run.
• Discovery is your problem now. Google Shopping, Meta, and your Amazon buyers become the acquisition engine you build deliberately.

So budget less for "moving data" and more for the storefront, the content, and the conversion setup — that's where an owned store lives or dies.

What does a done-for-you build cost?

Here's the developer side, from my published rate card in INR and USD.

A first Amazon-to-Shopify store for most sellers lands in the ₹1,50,000–₹4,00,000 range: clean catalogue import, a custom theme that sells the brand, conversion basics (reviews, trust signals, fast product pages), payments, and shipping. Larger catalogues, subscriptions, or custom features push higher. You can absolutely DIY a Basic store yourself with a premium theme — the custom vs premium theme trade-off is a real decision — but the sellers who hand it to a developer are usually protecting their own time to keep selling on Amazon while the store gets built.

Whichever route you pick, if you'd rather have someone own the move end to end, that's exactly what my Shopify migration service does — catalogue, theme, payments, and conversion, live and selling.

What are the first steps, this month?

You don't need to rebuild everything to start. In order:

1. Register a domain and pick a plan. Basic is the right start for most, and Shopify's India trial is "3 days free, then ₹20/month for 3 months". Get the brand name locked.
2. Set up payments and shipping. A gateway like Razorpay, PayU or Cashfree for prepaid orders, Shopify's built-in COD method, and a courier. See Shiprocket/Delhivery fulfilment.
3. Import 10 hero products first. Not the whole catalogue — your best-sellers, done properly, to launch fast.
4. Turn on email/WhatsApp capture from day one. This is the whole point. Every visitor and order should feed a list you own.
5. Route your Amazon buyers over. Package inserts, a QR code, a "buy direct" incentive — legally nudge your existing Amazon customers to your store, where the second order is far more profitable.
6. Then scale traffic. Google Shopping, Meta, content — once the store converts, pour fuel on it.

Do those six and you have an owned, revenue-earning store running alongside Amazon within weeks — the two-channel model that actually compounds.

What's next

If you sell on Amazon and want a Shopify store you actually own — catalogue moved across, a storefront that converts, payments and shipping live — that's the exact scope of my Shopify migration service. Tell me your category, roughly how many SKUs, and your monthly Amazon volume on the start page, and I'll come back with an honest fixed price and timeline — and tell you if you should stay Amazon-only a while longer.

Related reads

• Hidden costs of running a Shopify store in India — what actually leaves your account each month.
• Multichannel sync: Meesho, Flipkart, Amazon + Shopify — keeping stock in sync across marketplaces and your store.
• Why your Shopify store isn't converting — the conversion muscle you need when traffic is no longer borrowed.

Sources

• Shopify — India pricing
• Amazon Seller Central — selling on Amazon.in
• Amazon.in — referral fee schedule
• Amazon India press release: zero referral fees on products under ₹1,000 (effective March 16, 2026)
• Shopify Help: supported countries for Shopify Payments
• Shopify Help: manual payments (no third-party transaction fee)
• Razorpay pricing (2% standard domestic rate, 18% GST on the fee)