Ecommerce app and software development
Most businesses selling products online should use Shopify or WooCommerce, not commission custom software. Custom ecommerce earns its cost in three situations: a marketplace with multiple sellers, a catalogue or pricing model the platforms cannot express, or unit economics where platform fees exceed the cost of ownership.
Be honest about whether you need custom
A single-brand store with a conventional catalogue is a solved problem. Shopify will do it better than a custom build, because thousands of engineer-years have gone into the checkout you would be reimplementing. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling hours.
The picture changes when the model does not fit the box. Multi-vendor marketplaces need seller onboarding, per-seller inventory, commission splits, and payouts — all of which are add-on plugins with sharp edges on hosted platforms. Rental and booking commerce needs availability calendars, deposits and returns rather than a simple cart. Complex B2B pricing — customer-specific rates, tiered quantities, approval workflows — is a genuine misfit for a consumer checkout.
What a marketplace actually requires
We built a peer-to-peer rental marketplace end to end, and the surprising part is how little of the work is the storefront.
Listings need moderation, because open submission attracts abuse immediately. Bookings need availability logic that cannot double-book under concurrent requests. Money needs a ledger — not a status column — because "paid" and "refunded" and "partially settled" are states you will have to reconcile later. Refunds need a real record before you promise one publicly: we found a live product promising full refunds on a policy page with no refund code behind it at all, which is a support and legal problem waiting to happen.
Discounts and offers must be evaluated where they are charged, not just where they are displayed, or the advertised price and the collected price drift apart. Deposits are a separate concept from rent and should be modelled that way from the start.
- Seller onboarding, verification and moderation queues
- Availability and booking logic that holds under concurrency
- A money ledger with refunds as first-class records
- Commission, payouts and settlement reporting
- Admin tooling — the part that decides whether the business can actually be operated
Payments and settlement in India
Razorpay and similar gateways handle cards, UPI, netbanking and wallets, and each has different settlement timing and failure modes. Build for the failure modes: webhooks arrive late, arrive twice, or arrive before your own verification call completes. Every payment handler needs to be idempotent, and the way to know it is to fire duplicate webhooks at it deliberately.
Recurring payments are their own project. Mandates behave differently from one-off charges, embedded checkout flows can stall on mandate creation where a hosted page succeeds, and there are regulatory caps on certain recurring amounts. These are the details that turn a two-week integration into a two-month one if they are discovered late.
One thing worth stating plainly: a stored-value wallet holding rupees is a regulated payment instrument in India. Loyalty points and coins are not the same thing, and conflating them in your data model creates a compliance problem later.
Performance decides conversion
Commerce is the category where speed is revenue, and mobile is where the traffic is. The rental marketplace we built went from a mobile Lighthouse score of 74 to 89 and 1,208 KB to 758 KB of page weight — by self-hosting fonts, localising every image off third-party hosts, and deferring hero assets rather than loading them eagerly.
The single largest win was unglamorous: a font import in the CSS was blocking render, and one currency glyph was pulling in an 84 KB typeface that we split down to 8.6 KB.
Frequently asked
Should I use Shopify or build a custom ecommerce site?
Use Shopify or WooCommerce for a single-brand store with a conventional catalogue — you will get a better checkout than a custom build for far less money. Build custom when you need a multi-vendor marketplace, a rental or booking model, complex B2B pricing, or when platform transaction fees have grown past the cost of owning the software.
How long does it take to build a marketplace?
Longer than a storefront, because most of the work is not the storefront. Seller onboarding, moderation, booking concurrency, a money ledger with refunds, commission and payouts, and admin tooling each carry real weight. A credible first version is a matter of months, not weeks.
Which payment gateway should we use in India?
Razorpay is a common and capable choice for cards, UPI, netbanking and wallets. The gateway matters less than how you handle its failure modes: webhooks that arrive late, twice, or out of order. Every payment handler must be idempotent, and it should be tested by deliberately firing duplicate webhooks at it.
Can you build a rental or booking platform rather than a shop?
Yes — we have built one end to end, including listings and moderation, availability and bookings, wallets and coupons, a refund ledger, admin tooling and city-level browsing. Rental commerce needs availability, deposits and returns rather than a cart, so it is genuinely different software from a storefront.
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