Do You Even Need a Website? Honest Math for a Rs 500 per Month Seller

1. What a full online store really costs

A store builder sounds simple until you add up the lines. Take Shopify, the biggest name in online stores. Its Basic plan is listed at Rs 1,994 a month, or Rs 1,499 a month if you pay for the year. On top of that come transaction fees: Shopify's own pricing page says card and third-party gateway fees apply and vary by plan, without publishing the exact percentages. So you pay the monthly fee and then keep paying on every sale.

There is no free plan to hide behind either. Shopify gives you a 3-day free trial, then Rs 20 a month for the first three months, and after that you are on a paid plan. The trial gets you in the door. It does not change the long-term math.

One honest note before we go further: these are Shopify India's listed prices as of September 2026. Prices change over time, so check the current pricing before you decide. The structure rarely changes though. Monthly fee plus a cut of every order is the standard model.

2. The hidden costs nobody puts on the pricing page

The subscription is only the beginning. A full store comes with costs that never appear on the pricing page:

• Someone for every change. Want a new banner, a different layout, a small fix? Store platforms have dashboards with menus and settings that take real learning. Most sellers end up paying a developer or an agency for changes, again and again.
• Themes and add-ons. The free theme looks fine until you want your store to look like yours. Paid themes, plugins, and premium features quietly add to the bill.
• Domain renewals. Your store needs its own address. That is a yearly renewal you must remember and pay, separate from the plan.
• Your own time. Learning the dashboard, setting up shipping, testing checkout, fixing what breaks. For a seller who just wants to sell, that time is a cost too.

3. The honest alternative math

Now compare that with a catalog link. Catalink costs Rs 500 a month, flat. Unlimited products. No per-order fee, so a sale costs you nothing extra. No developer needed, because adding a product is like posting a WhatsApp status: photo, name, price, one line of details, done.

And here is the part sellers forget to factor in: your customers are already on WhatsApp and Instagram anyway. A buyer taps "I want this" on your catalog and lands straight in your chat with the product name and price pre-filled. The sale closes where it was always going to close, in conversation. The catalog just saves you from sending the same twenty photos every day.

4. When a website DOES make sense

This is not an argument that websites are always wrong. A full store is genuinely the right tool in a few situations:

• You are getting hundreds of orders a month. At that volume, answering every customer in chat becomes the bottleneck, and automated checkout pays for itself.
• You need automated checkout. Cart, payment, order confirmation without you touching each sale. If your business model depends on that, a catalog link will not give it to you.
• WhatsApp is genuinely holding you back. If customers are dropping off because they want to browse and pay on their own at midnight, that is a real signal that chat-first selling has hit its limit.

If none of that describes you yet, you are paying for power you do not use. A catalog link does the job that actually matters right now: showing your products clearly and getting buyers into your chat ready to buy.

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Do the math for your own situation. If chat is where your sales already happen, start with a catalog link for Rs 500 a month and upgrade to a full store later, when the volume earns it.