14 May 2022, Mumbai:
Ecommerce majors including Flipkart, Reliance Retail, and Amazon plan to join the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), which plans to soon start tis pilot program to on-board kiranas and small and medium businesses in Bengaluru and four other cities.
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Flipkart’s logistics arm Ekart and Reliance Retail-backed Dunzo have already integrated with ONDC for logistics services while PhonePe, which is also owned by Flipkart and Walmart, is joining the network and is in advanced stages of integration, these people said.
Still, at a nascent stage, ONDC is being pitched as a solution to break the dominance of large e-commerce firms like Walmart-owned Flipkart, Amazon, and others in India. The platform will enable all the buyers in the network to be discoverable to all the sellers, says ThampyKoshy, CEO, of ONDC.
Koshy said the network aims to scale its presence in about 100 cities by August and it will also be opened to the wider public in five cities — Bengaluru, New Delhi, Coimbatore, Bhopal, and Shillong — where the pilot is underway.
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The network is currently in the “beta testing” phase with just five sellers onboard and a limited set of buyers from five cities.
The network aims to on-board small sellers and some expect it to have an impact on e-commerce similar to what the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) had on digital payments. It is a “decentralised” platform without the need for customers and sellers to be on one platform.
ONDC is also educating key stakeholders, including online merchants, that visibility on the network won’t be influenced by certain algorithms by e-commerce platforms — a growing concern among online sellers. Ecommerce firms maintain their algorithms do not treat sellers in a discriminatory manner while favoring others.
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