Does your Shopify store need to register for GST in India?

Which GST registration threshold applies to your Shopify store?

Two taxes share one acronym. This page is about the GST you charge an Indian customer and owe to the government; the GST Shopify adds to its own invoice for your subscription and fees is a separate question.

For a seller engaged in the exclusive supply of goods, the threshold in most Indian states is Rs 40 lakh of aggregate turnover in a financial year, in force since 1 April 2019. CBIC states the figure and its exceptions in one sentence of its GST Concept & Status paper.

Notification 10/2019-Central Tax carves a short list out of that relief: ice cream, pan masala, tobacco, and certain fly-ash, building-brick and roofing-tile lines stay on Rs 20 lakh even in a 40-lakh state. Apparel, cosmetics and electronics are not on it.

CBIC — GST Concept & Status (as on 1 April 2019), and section 22 of the CGST Act in the CBIC tax repository, both read September 7, 2026.

Those thresholds are measured in aggregate turnover, not your admin's Total sales; what that figure counts and leaves out has its own page.

Who registers in India regardless of turnover?

Section 24 of the CGST Act lists thirteen categories of person who must register whatever their turnover. Three of them reach a Shopify merchant: persons making any inter-State taxable supply, non-resident taxable persons, and persons supplying through an e-commerce operator required to collect tax at source under section 52. The list is longer than these three.

The first is the trap: a store well under Rs 40 lakh that ships goods to a buyer in a neighbouring state has no threshold to stand on. Section 24 does not limit the inter-State clause to goods, so a service crossing a state line is inside its words. A notification then exempts suppliers of taxable services under Rs 20 lakh from registering — ten lakh in the special category States the Constitution names, a wider list than section 22 keeps. For goods no such exemption exists at any turnover.

The marketplace clause works the same way for goods: selling them through an operator that collects tax at source is its own ground for registration, not something turnover switches off. A parallel notification exempts service suppliers under the same limits who supply through such an operator, with services taxed under section 9(5) left out.

Non-resident taxable persons have their own entry, so a seller with no presence in India is answered by a clause rather than a threshold. Another jurisdiction asks the mirror-image question, and a separate page covers Australian GST for a non-resident store.

Why you will see Rs 20 lakh quoted instead

The Act itself says something different, and its twenty-lakh line still stands. Section 22 of the CGST Act still makes a supplier liable above twenty lakh rupees, or ten lakh rupees from a special category State. The Rs 40 lakh relief for goods-only suppliers came by notification instead.

Two different lists of states sit behind the thresholds in this section, and merging them is the costliest mistake here. Section 22 starts from the eleven states the Constitution names and takes seven of them back out — Jammu and Kashmir, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Sikkim and Uttarakhand — which leaves Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura as its special category States.

CBIC puts its Rs 10 lakh services line on those same four states. The second list is the 40-lakh notification for goods, which names ten: Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Puducherry, Sikkim, Telangana, Tripura and Uttarakhand. Never move a list between rules.

Shopify's India GST help page summarises registration as turnover above Rs 20 lakh, or Rs 10 lakh for North Eastern and hill states — a phrase absent from the Act. Read it as Shopify's own summary, not as the current rule: for a merchant supplying goods exclusively it understates the threshold in force.

Trade press ahead of the 56th GST Council meeting described a proposal to lift the limits to Rs 50 lakh for services and Rs 1 crore for goods. No official page we read on September 7, 2026 — the CBIC repository for sections 22 and 24, the CBIC GST Concept & Status paper, the GST Council site and Shopify's help page — documents an adopted increase.

What Shopify does — and does not do — once you register

Shopify ships GST settings for India and the rates arrive filled in — which is where the misreading starts.

Shopify puts the accuracy of those rates on you, telling merchants to check with local tax authorities or a tax professional, and adds that it does not create a GST-compliant bill.

Nor does registration hand the paperwork over: Shopify helps automate the calculation but does not remit or file your taxes — the same split that a separate page describes for sales tax.

So the sequence is yours: confirm your line, register through the GST portal or a practitioner in your state, then review every rate in the admin before the next order lands.