ONDC food and grocery orders double in a week to shoot past 10,000 a day

Backed by the government, ONDC seeks to prevent the dominance of a few large platforms in e-commerce and food delivery sectors like Amazon, Flipkart, Swiggy and Zomato.

Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) has seen the number of retail orders per day double to over 10,000 in a week on the back stepped-up marketing efforts and rapid addition of sellers.

While the number of orders, which primarily include food and grocery purchases, crossed the 5,000 per day threshold on April 24, it topped the 10,000-mark on April 30.

According to people familiar with the development, around 40 percent of these orders are from Bengaluru and another 40 percent are coming from cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Hyderabad. Rest of the orders are emerging from more than 200 other cities where the network has launched its pilots.

ONDC classifies sales of food, grocery, home décor, electronics etc as retail, whereas booking of cabs and autos on the Namma Yatri app are categorised as mobility. The network has crossed more than 25,000 rides booked per day, Moneycontrol reported earlier.

“We have been reaching out to influencers for marketing the network. Even other network participants like seller and buyer-side platforms are promoting it more as the processes are getting settled,” said ONDC chief executive officer T Koshy.

However, he declined to comment on the exact number and demographics of orders being processed by the network or its participants.

On its part, the network is also seeding consumer demand by giving discounts of Rs 50 per order.  Meanwhile, the merchant base on ONDC has risen to 93,000 currently — from around 800 in December  — after it launched an incentive scheme for seller-side apps to enroll merchants. Of the total seller base, 35,000 are from non-mobility categories like food, grocery, home décor and electronics.

As part of its next leg of growth, ONDC plans to tie up with agri product aggregators to enable farmers from distant corners of the country to sell online. Koshy said that consumers could expect to buy any agricultural product straight from the farms, be it pure hone, saffron or millets.

Backed by the government, ONDC seeks to prevent the dominance of a few large platforms in e-commerce and food delivery sectors like Amazon, Flipkart, Swiggy and Zomato.

With the network, the government hopes 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: 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 in some Tier-II cities.

Top FMCG players like Unilever, ITC, Dabur and Nivea and banks like Kotak Mahindra and IDFC First are in various stages of integrating with the network.

Built on the guardrails of software designed by the Beckn Foundation, a non-profit backed by Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani, ONDC wants to replicate the success of the United Payments Interface (UPI) in digital payments for digital commerce in India.