The Online Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) has achieved a significant milestone by receiving over 5,000 daily orders in the retail category, predominantly comprising of food and beverage (F&B) and grocery items. This remarkable achievement represents a 25-fold increase in the past two months, after experiencing a slow start and receiving only a few hundred orders during the first six months of its launch in April.
ONDC Chief Executive T Koshy, said, “We even hit 6,000 retail orders per day during the weekend. You should not also discount the mobility category as we have been doing around 25,000 rides daily via the Namma Yatri app.”
In the previous month, ONDC incorporated Namma Yatri, a mobility aggregation platform that operates on an open-source model and does not levy any commission on drivers. According to ONDC, this open mobility foundation will enable customers to book rides from multiple applications, and eventually, it will become multi-modal by integrating various modes of transportation such as cabs, metro, and buses into the application.
With regards to retail category orders, Koshy mentioned that although Bengaluru usually dominates in terms of the highest number of orders on most days, Delhi occasionally surpasses the tech hub.
After launching in select pin codes of Bengaluru on September 30, ONDC has expanded its operations to multiple cities. Presently, two cities, including Bengaluru, are in the beta stage, while 181 cities are in the alpha stage.
“Be it PhonePe’s Pincode, Paytm, Mystore or Magicpin, every player is trying to ramp up their orders on ONDC… Every buyer app will have their own strategies to bring their user bases to the network,” he added.
To stimulate consumer demand, the network is offering discounts of INR 50 per order. Additionally, the merchant base on ONDC has surged to 85,000 presently, up from 800 in December. This growth can be attributed to an incentive scheme for seller-side applications that encourage merchants to enroll. Of the overall seller base, 31,000 are from non-mobility categories such as food, grocery, home decor, and electronics.
Supported by the government, ONDC aims to curb the monopoly of a few prominent players like Amazon, Flipkart, Swiggy, and Zomato in the e-commerce and food delivery sectors.
The government aspires to enhance e-commerce penetration in the country by utilizing the network, with the goal of reaching 900 million buyers and 1.2 million sellers within the next two years, thereby achieving a gross merchandise value of $48 billion.
To minimize business expenses for all stakeholders, including retailers, ONDC is relying on three primary pillars: dynamic pricing, inventory management, and delivery cost optimization.
In April 2022, the network conducted a soft launch in five cities, namely Bengaluru, Delhi-NCR, Shillong, Bhopal, and Coimbatore. Subsequently, ONDC commenced a Beta pilot in Bengaluru and several Tier-II cities.
Several top FMCG players, including Unilever, ITC, Dabur, and Nivea, as well as banks like Kotak Mahindra and IDFC First, are at different stages of integrating with the network.
Leveraging the software framework developed by the Beckn Foundation, a non-profit organization supported by Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani, ONDC aims to emulate the achievements of the United Payments Interface (UPI) in India’s digital payment ecosystem within the digital commerce realm.
