ONDC to evaluate etailers based on commitment, says CEO Thampy Koshy

The government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) will regularly consider the efficiency and dedication of any platforms becoming a member of the community with respect to their contribution in the direction of the progress of ONDC, chief government Thampy Koshy advised ET when requested whether or not ONDC will likely be eradicating platforms that do not have their principal platform on the community, as per directions of the union commerce and trade minister Piyush Goyal on Monday.

Goyal had mentioned, “a few days ago, there was a company that had created an ONDC-specific platform. That’s exactly what we don’t want to happen. Be on ONDC through your main platform.”

PhonePe on April 4 launched its ONDC-specific ecommerce platform Pincode. It didn’t touch upon the problem. As ET has reported earlier on April 5, PhonePe has earmarked $10-15 million for Pincode.

A supply from ONDC mentioned, “The thought process behind what the minister said was that there should be no platform, not just Bengaluru-based, but also Big Tech, which should join ONDC without total commitment. If any player joins, their entire customer base should have visibility of ONDC. He wanted to send this message clearly and is not against any platform.”

Considering the investments being made by firms constructing ONDC-specific apps, they are going to stay dedicated to the trigger, to get consumers, the supply identified. “Investors may be interested only because of a company’s ONDC strategy,” the supply mentioned.

“The minister may not ask ONDC to shut down any platform but just ensure the entire customer base is visible to the network, which platforms will do eventually. For example, PhonePe has been asked to provide a plugin to Pincode in their application to make it visible to all its customers. Their numbers have been going up and will also add other cities soon,” the supply quoted above mentioned.

The community is presently enterprise 5,000 to six,000 retail orders per day. In April 2022, the community piloted a gentle launch in 5 cities – Bengaluru, Delhi NCR, Shillong, Bhopal and Coimbatore. Since then, ONDC has additionally began a beta pilot in Bengaluru and in some tier-II cities.

ONDC went dwell in some pin codes of Bengaluru on September 30, and has since expanded to a number of cities – two of which together with Bengaluru are within the beta stage, and 181 within the alpha stage.

The community has 38 contributors who’re dwell on the community out of which eight are consumers, 24 are sellers, and 7 are logistics service suppliers.

Also learn: ETtech Explainer | ONDC: India’s bid to interrupt ecommerce monopolies

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