BENGALURU: Government’s ambitious open network e-commerce platform, the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), started its beta testing process with small retailers across 16 pincodes in Bengaluru on Friday.
As per government sources as many as 497 sellers, and 17 apps were live on the platform on the first day of its going live. As many as 100,000 products were listed on the platform on the first day across grocery, and food and beverages categories.
Currently, only these two categories of products are available on the platform. Sources further said till 5:30 pm on Friday, 161 orders were placed on the network, 59 orders were delivered and the rest were in the process of delivery. Of those 161 orders, 55% were for grocery products and 45% in the food and beverages category.
ONDC, which is based on open specifications, will boost small merchant digitisation and e-commerce scale, and will reduce dominance of big players such as Amazon and Walmart-backed Flipkart. It is an initiative of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. Anil Agarwal, additional director, Department of Promotion of Industries and Internal Trade (DPIIT), told TNIE the government is in the process of validating the technologies and processes and the focus is now on fulfillment of orders on the platform.
The platform will host buyer and seller apps separately, unlike e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Flipkart, which are both buyers and sellers platforms. Three buyers apps – Paytm, Spicemoney and Mystore – were on the platform on the first day of the beta testing. As many as 11 seller apps, which are aggregators of small retailers and kirana stores, also integrated with the system on the first day. Apart from them, Dunzo, Loadshare and Shiprocket were the logistics service providers.
Sources said 20 more apps and 570 sellers will soon become part of ONDC platform. Dilip Vamanan, co-founder of seller onboarding platform SellerApp said they have onboarded 31 kirana stores, 12 D2C Brands, 5 CPG brands and the responses from the sellers were amazing.
497 sellers, 17 apps go live on ONDC
As per sources, 497 sellers, 17 apps were live on the platform on first day of going live. 100,000 products were listed on the platform on first day across grocery, and food and beverages categories. Only 2 categories of products are available on the platform at present