ONDC to start beta testing in parts of Delhi on Nov 28, focus on food delivery

Representative Image.

Almost two months after starting its beta testing phase in Bengaluru, Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC)  is planning a similar launch in parts of Delhi-NCR on November 28. Several people close to developments told Moneycontrol that the focus would be on South and Central Delhi where top government offices, officials and ministers reside.

“Details regarding the launch are still getting ironed out and there will be more clarity on the same after November 15. Another set of early testing might also start on November 20 whereas the beta launch is set to happen on November 28,” said a person close to the developments.

“While the focus in the Bengaluru launch was more on the grocery side, the priority will be on food delivery in Delhi,” he added.

Another source close to the developments said that ONDC is working hard to graduate to a more mainstream and bigger launch after the beta phase that may happen in late January or early February. This might involve top central government ministers and officials.

There will be two sets of participants for the beta launch in Delhi. First would be those who were there in the previous launch such as Paytm on the buyer side; SellerApp, eSamudaay, Digiit, Ushop, GrowthFalcons and GoFrugal on the seller side; Loadshare and Dunzo as logistics service providers.

Additionally, a new set of players are expected to join the Delhi launch such as IDFC, Kotak, Spicemoney, CraftsVilla and Mystore on the buyer side; Innobits, Uengage, Bizom, Nstore on the seller side; and Shiprocket as a logistics service provider.

According to people close to the developments, ONDC participants have been cumulatively servicing 50-60 orders per day in Bengaluru after the beta testing launch in October. During this time, the network has solved some initial technical challenges such as location tracking of orders or apps not responding to the protocol.

“This experience will help the beta launch in Delhi be much more smooth. Moreover, those who were early integrators with a previous version of the protocol have been migrating to a new and better version that was launched in August,” said a person close to the developments.

SellerApp, a firm that is onboarding merchants to ONDC, is prioritising D2C brands for the Delhi beta testing phase while its focus was on kirana stores during the Bengaluru launch.

“While we have got a good response from kirana stores, they really need to be handheld constantly as they adapt to the digital medium. We have seen that almost 35 percent of the grocery stores we had onboarded have remained active and are gradually becoming more digitally savvy,” said Dilip Vamanan, co-founder of SellerApp.

“As you need to be consistently in touch with them to help them make the transition, we would want to do it for fewer grocery stores in Delhi. On the other hand, the focus will be more on D2C as Delhi is somewhat of a D2C capital. We will have up to 25 D2C players, including Kapiva, Boyo, Three Clive Road and others,” he added.

On the food side, restaurant digitisation platform Uengage is planning to already has 60-odd eateries onboarded to the network in Delhi. In the next couple of weeks, it is aiming to reach the 100-mark.

The four-year old company sees its integration with ONDC as a logical extension to its core business model of providing restaurants with an alternative to food aggregators like Zomato and Swiggy for taking orders digitally, marketing automation and logistics management.

“We have built a do-it-yourself app so that restaurants can download it and onboard themselves completely within a matter of hours, depending on the size of their catalogues,” said Sameer Sharma, founder of Uengage.

The structure of separate buying and selling platforms is one of the key differences between the closed-loop model of e-commerce and the open network model. As all e-commerce platforms – from Amazon and Flipkart to Swiggy and Zomato – today are cast in the former style, they can control which sellers are given prominence in the listings and have gated communities of users.

ONDC seeks to break down this structure into a modular form of e-commerce where, potentially, any user on any platform can buy from any seller on any other platform.

It aims to raise e-commerce penetration in the next two years to 25 percent of India's consumer purchases, from nearly 8 percent now. It also hopes to sign up 900 million buyers and 1.2 million sellers on the shared network within the next five years, while achieving gross merchandise value of $48 billion.