ONDC Portal for small businesses

October 1, 2022 Finance Talk Valli Sarvani No comments

Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) was launched by the Government of India in April, aiming at small and rural eCommerce businesses in India.

ECommerce is growing in the country rapidly. However, it is dominated by global giants like Amazon and Flipkart (the majority of its stake was acquired by Walmart).

Hence, to provide opportunities to small and medium-sized businesses to get buyers, the government launched the initiative. This portal has been developed to open networks for eCommerce for small players also.

The government rolled out the ONDC initiative in Bengaluru. Its beta testing is available across 16 pin codes in the city. In addition, the pilot project is live in other cities like Delhi, Coimbatore, Bhopal, and Shillong.

More than 200 merchants have onboarded the portal in Bengaluru. The ONDC network aims to reach as many as 100 cities, with 30 million sellers and 10 million vendors by 2022. It aims to reach more than 25 percent of consumers within the next two years.

Within five years, it wishes to have 900 million buyers onboard and 1.2 million sellers on the portal. At the same time, it eyed on achieving a gross merchandise value of 48 billion dollars.

Grocery, food delivery, travel bookings, etc. are some important segments in the network. Users can see all engaged entities in one place with the help of the network.

The ONDC portal wants to put a check on the monopoly of big eCommerce players by encouraging small businesses to integrate their products with it.

Besides, it wants to end unethical practices like predatory pricing in both high-margin as well as high-value products.

The apps will be in Indian languages with a focus on rural businesses. It anticipates more startups will use the network due to its focus on small and medium-sized businesses.

As of now, some businesses joined the ONDC network. Ekart and Dunzo for logistics and banks like State bank of India, Punjab National Bank, Axis Bank, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank etc. are some of them. These banks offer loans, cards and other related services.

Photo by Igor Miske on Unsplash (Free for commercial use)