Evolving digital commerce will soon leave e-commerce irrelevant: ONDC chief

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E-commerce, as it is known today, will become irrelevant as India’s interoperable online commerce network allows small businesses to innovate and sell their products independent of a few big platforms, Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) chief T Koshy said at the India Fintech Conclave organised by Moneycontrol last week.

"It's like everybody having a Web page. Everybody will have their digital catalogue on ONDC. Then you will have specialised buying applications who, based on the kind of clientele they are dealing with - it could be elite customers, mid-segment, people from the villages, will help their clients source what is good for them, not what is pushed by somebody else,” he said.

“There is going to be a fundamental shift in the way commerce is running. Ecommerce as it is today will cease to be relevant. It will become one more distribution channel for the product owner,” he said.

The network has initiated a strategy to boost purchases of food, grocery, and home décor items by providing discount coupons to users. It plans to run the discounts through March to scale the number of transactions per day on the network to 5,000 from 200 now, Moneycontrol had reported earlier.

It seeks to increase e-commerce penetration in the country to 25 percent in the next two years, reaching 900 million buyers and 1.2 million sellers through the network and reaching a gross merchandise value of $48 billion.

ONDC is banking on three key pillars to reduce the cost of doing business for everyone, including retailers, and those are dynamic pricing, inventory management, and delivery cost optimisation.

In April 2022, the network piloted a soft launch in five cities – Bengaluru, Delhi NCR, Shillong, Bhopal and Coimbatore. Since then, ONDC has also started a Beta pilot in Bengaluru and other tier-2 cities.

At the Moneycontrol conclave, Koshy also said that ONDC is going to balloon because it is going to drive innovation – from the buying application in giving the consumer a specialised, personalised experience to helping many small and medium enterprises find a market not just in India, but also overseas.