eCommerce is a massive market. Everyone we know wants to sell something or the other.

One of the first excellent eCommerce platforms that was open-source was Magento which started somewhere during 2007. In 2008 version 1.0 was released. Because the source code was in PHP, it was adopted early on by developers and freelancers due to the infamous LAMP stack application. We were an early adopter of Magento 1.0 but since 2.0 and Adobe acquisition, there were multiple challenges with open-source and hence moved on to other platforms. Moreover, at that time the only common payment gateway that existed for Indian merchants was CCAcenue which was not available as a plugin module for Magento. So Magento was primarily for the US / Europe market. Payment via Paypal existed but was a major hassle trying to get it set up for Indian merchants.

Fast-forward to 2026, here are now our three top choices for eCommerce for our clients who want to set up an e-shop in India :

Shopify – we use Shopify for ease of use for our clients. Shopify is a managed eCommerce platform where we don’t own the code or the server. Customization is possible to a good extent using Shopify’s proprietary in-house server-side templating engine called Liquid. In a way it’s good because clients can manage the account themselves if they want to. The only dependency would be on the client-side Liquid template code. Payment is via RazorPay. But there are some hard limitations to using Shopify on the basic plan which is something in the range of about ₹25,000 per year. So expanding your e-commerce site would mean spending ₹80,000 annually – this is just for Shopify’s fees, not including Liquid template management and coding and other factors like maintaining the site etc from our end if a client doesn’t want to perform on their own.

Meloncart – a relatively new eCommerce module for OctoberCMS which is based on Laravel stack (LAMP). Open-source but a (one-time) license to use OctoberCMS is like $19 and a (one-time) license to use MelonCart module is $199 which is justifiable because a lot has gone into the development of the CMS and eComm module. They are very active on the forums and even launched RazorPay as a payment gateway within a week of our request.

Spwig – this Singapore based firm, is a brand new open-source eCommerce site based on the Django stack (Python) so this cannot sit on some regular hosting provider like Cloudways or Hostinger. You’ll need separate skillset resources for deployment on a droplet (server) like DigitalOcean or use a managed platform like on OpalStack which is geared for deploying Django-based applications. Spwig also very recently launched RazorPay payment gateway for Indian merchants because it was already using RazorPay for the Singapore market.

What I prefer on MelonCart and Spwig is that, both don’t use SPA technology (like using React or Vue or Angular for fast page reloads) and use 100% server-side template rendering by default. Server-side rendering is better for SEO, even though many claim that SPAs have advanced to be search-engine optimized with NextJS, NuxtJS etc. But maintaining 2 code bases (one for back-end and one for front-end) would increase the cost in human resources if not an increase in cost of a single human resource.

I bet you are now wondering, what about WooCommerce, the famous WordPress plugin for eCommerce – we do undertake projects in WooCommerce, but only if the client specifically insists on it – if WordPress being core is a necessity. WordPress being the #1 software for blogs, micro-sites, landing pages, multi-page branding sites, is easily deployable to almost all hosting providers in the world and with minimal cost. So adding WooCommerce to it is like adding cherry to a cake. The main advantage of using WordPress and WooCommerce is that it can be hosted anywhere and there’s minimal server-side setup for non high-traffic sites. And then there is the plethora of plugins like the super-famous Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.

So, if you’re looking to launch an online store for your shop or business, take the plunge and call us at 8108132020 and help us help you get online with any one of the storefronts mentioned above and see your business grow.