The truth about outsourcing eCommerce development to India

Indian agencies quote $15 to $65 an hour for Shopify and Magento work, against $150 to $300 for senior work from a US shop. What that gap buys in 2026 has changed since 2019, and you may already be buying Indian development without knowing it.

You hire a London agency to rebuild your Magento checkout. There is a reasonable chance the work is done in Ahmedabad, under a contract written so that you never find out.

A number of Ahmedabad agencies advertise, on their own websites, that they work as the backend Shopify and Magento team for agencies in the US and Europe. One sets out the model in detail: an NDA signed before any project details are shared, communication routed only through the hiring agency, work delivered under that agency's brand with no visible third-party involvement, and a pilot task offered so the agency can judge quality first. Its FAQ answers the obvious question directly. It will never contact your clients. Another Ahmedabad firm states that it already acts as the backend Shopify team for multiple agencies worldwide.

None of that is a scandal. It is a normal capacity model and those firms are open about it. But it does mean the question is rarely whether to outsource to India. For a lot of merchants, the question is whether they know they already have, and at what markup.

The rates, and where they actually sit now

Offshore rates in India and South Asia run $15 to $45 an hour, with vetted senior engineers at $30 to $65 and certified Magento specialists commonly quoted at $30 to $60. A dedicated Shopify developer through an Indian agency runs $3,000 to $6,000 a month, which is a mid to senior package. Junior and mid dedicated resources are advertised well below it. US agencies charge $150 to $300 an hour at the senior end. Even allowing that this is the top of the US band, the difference is not marginal and no amount of caveating makes it one.

The low end needs reading carefully. Upwork's own figures put Adobe Commerce developers in the region of $25 an hour, with the bulk of contracts running from the mid teens to the high thirties, across every geography on the platform. That is the floor of the market, and competence starts well above it.

The part that has actually changed

India now hosts 2,117 global capability centres across 3,728 units, employing around 2.36 million professionals, with total ecosystem market revenue of $98.4 billion and 32 percent growth in centre count since FY2021, according to the NASSCOM and Zinnov GCC Landscape Report published in July 2026. Some 506 Forbes Global 2000 companies now run one. These are captive engineering centres, owned and staffed by the multinationals themselves. And they pay up to 20 percent above IT services companies, on TeamLease Digital's analysis. That figure is from their FY2025 primer, and the gap on scarce skills has widened since.

A Fortune 500 captive centre and an Indian product company both outbid the services agency quoting you, and both are hiring hard. The overlap with the pool you are actually hiring from is only partial. A GCC filling cloud and AI roles in Bengaluru is not bidding against an Ahmedabad Magento shop for the same person. What it does is absorb the strongest generalists before agencies get to them, and set a salary expectation that agency pay has to answer.

The saving still exists, at a higher price point than it used to. Twenty-five dollars an hour in 2026 buys something different from what it bought in 2019, because the people who sat at that price point then have somewhere better to be now. The agencies competing hardest for those staff are the ones whose rates have risen, which is why the $30 to $65 senior band exists at all. Indian engineering talent is in enough demand at home that the bottom of the offshore market is increasingly what domestic employers passed on.

Attrition, which is less of a problem than you were told

The standard warning about offshore teams is churn. Your lead developer leaves three months in and the context goes with them.

The numbers have moved against that story. Aon's annual salary increase and turnover survey put overall Indian attrition at 16.2 percent in 2025, down from 17.7 in 2024 and 18.7 in 2023, with IT services running around 13 to 15 percent and GCCs near 12.6, a historic low. Those would look healthy in most Western markets.

One number does stand out. Ecommerce as a sector runs at 25 to 28 percent, roughly double the IT services rate. In Indian survey terms, though, ecommerce means ecommerce companies, the marketplaces and D2C brands, and an agency in Ahmedabad building Magento stores sits under IT services. So 13 to 15 percent is the figure that most likely describes your development partner, and 25 to 28 describes the merchants they build for. Ask a prospective partner what their own attrition was last year, and what average tenure looks like on the pod that would hold your account. If they have the figure ready, they have been watching it.

What the rate card leaves out

The loading works the same way employer taxes do onshore. Figures for this come from outsourcing vendors, with no independent source to check them against, so treat them as directional. The common estimate puts delivered cost at 1.4 to 1.8 times the quoted rate once you add management time on your side, ramp-up, async communication, and attrition, which would make a $32 an hour quote behave like $45 to $58.

The mechanism is easier to trust than the multiplier. Rework is the variable that moves it, and on a long project the difference between a team that reworks 10 percent and one that reworks 30 percent swallows most of a $20 an hour rate gap. Run the comparison on total project cost and your own supervision hours. The rate card is the least useful number in the quote.

The second variable is overlap, and it is more ecommerce-specific than it looks. With under four hours of shared working time, a clarifying question can add a full day to a decision cycle, and across a sixteen-week project that compounds. It is survivable on a maintenance retainer and painful on a checkout migration with a Black Friday deadline. The same team can be the right call in February and the wrong one in September.

If you are hiring directly rather than buying an agency

Different question, different numbers, and lower ones than most rate guides imply. Glassdoor puts the average Magento developer in India at ₹6.2 lakh a year, with the middle half between ₹4.1 and ₹9.75 lakh, from 208 reported salaries. Senior Magento developers average ₹9 lakh, with the middle half between ₹6.8 and ₹13.5 lakh. Bangalore adds almost nothing on this particular skill, averaging ₹6.1 lakh, so a Bangalore address on the quote is not buying you more Magento. Those are employment costs. The gap between them and an agency rate is the agency's margin plus the recruiting, management, and retention you would otherwise be doing yourself, in a market where GCCs are actively outbidding you.

The honest caveats

Two.

First, almost every rate figure in this piece comes from an outsourcing vendor's own marketing, because there is no neutral source for offshore development pricing. They corroborate each other, which is weak evidence, though better than none. The GCC, attrition, and salary figures are better sourced than the rate bands are.

Second, we run a job board and have an obvious interest in merchants hiring people directly. Read the arithmetic and ignore the conclusion if you like it less than we do.

What decides whether offshore is cheap is the quality of your specification. A clearly scoped plugin build or a defined integration with a competent Ahmedabad shop is straightforwardly cheaper than the US equivalent, and the firms doing that work are good at it. A vague headless migration is where the 1.8 multiplier comes from, and a vague brief would produce the same result in Berlin or Boston.

The country stopped being the variable worth arguing about. The tier you buy at is what decides the outcome.

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