A store that looks great and loses orders at checkout is the most expensive kind of website. I have seen shops spend lakhs on design and then discover that their payment step fails on one popular UPI app, that shipping charges are calculated wrong for two states, or that stock goes negative because two people bought the last item at the same time. None of that shows up in a design mockup.
I'm Arun Tyagi, a freelance Laravel and React developer in Sector 58, Noida. My ecommerce work focuses on the unglamorous parts that decide whether money arrives: checkout, inventory, taxes, and order handling.
Shopify, WooCommerce, or custom: the honest answer
I will not push custom code when a hosted platform is enough. Here is how I usually decide.
| Situation | What I suggest |
|---|---|
| Under 200 products, standard checkout, you want to launch this month | Shopify or WooCommerce |
| Content-heavy store already on WordPress | WooCommerce, see WordPress development |
| B2B pricing, quotes, credit limits, customer-specific catalogues | Custom Laravel |
| Multi-vendor marketplace with commissions and payouts | Custom Laravel |
| Heavy integration with ERP, warehouse, or export paperwork | Custom Laravel |
If you land in the first two rows, you will save money by not hiring me for a custom build, and I will say so.
Where custom Laravel earns its cost
Off-the-shelf platforms start to fight you when your business rules get unusual. A garment exporter who sells wholesale by the carton and retail by the piece, a seller with tiered discounts per customer group, a store that must generate GST invoices in a specific format. Plugins can approximate these, but five plugins stacked together become slow and fragile.
For examples of this kind of work, look at the case studies. One of them is an export commerce and warehouse system where the product catalogue was the easy part and stock movement across locations was the hard one.
Things I build into every store
- Checkout that survives failure: payment webhooks reconcile orders even if the customer closes the browser on the gateway page.
- Stock locking: inventory reserved during checkout so the last unit cannot be sold twice.
- Razorpay, Stripe, PayU, COD: with proper refund and partial-capture flows.
- Shipping rules: by pincode, weight, or carrier API, including Shiprocket-style integrations.
- GST-ready invoices: HSN codes, state-wise tax split, downloadable PDFs.
- An admin your team can actually use: built in Filament so order handling does not need a developer on call.
Speed and search visibility
Product pages that take five seconds to load on a phone lose buyers before they see the price. I keep catalogue pages cached, images properly sized, and structured data (Product, Offer, Breadcrumb) accurate so search engines understand the listing. I will not promise rankings. Nobody honest can. But a technically clean store gives your marketing spend a fair chance.
Typical investment in India
- Hosted store setup and customisation: ?25,000 - ?80,000, depending on theme work and integrations.
- Custom Laravel store, single vendor: ?1,20,000 - ?3,50,000.
- B2B or multi-vendor platform: ?3,00,000 - ?8,00,000+, phased in milestones.
- Monthly care after launch: from ?8,000, see maintenance and support.
Everything is quoted after a written scope. Full numbers for a few project types are on the pricing page, and the ecommerce platform solution page lists the typical modules.
How a project runs
We start with a short call about your catalogue, order flow, and what hurts today. I send back a phase-one scope with a fixed price. You see a working staging store within the first couple of weeks, not at the end. Payments are tested with real sandbox transactions before anything touches live money.
If you are comparing options, send me your current store URL or a rough product list on WhatsApp at +91 8791775933. Or book a free call and we can talk through whether custom is worth it for you. If it is not, I will point you to the simpler route.