ONDC grows 25 times in 2 months to cross 5,000 food, grocery orders a day 

ONDC chief T Koshy says that while Bengaluru accounted for the highest number of orders on the network on most days, Delhi tended to top the tech hub on a few days

Online Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) has crossed the milestone of 5,000 daily orders in the retail category, which mostly includes foods and beverages (F&B) and grocery, making a 25-fold growth in the last two months after it struggled to go beyond a few hundred orders in the first six months of its launch last April.

"We even hit 6,000 retail orders per day during the weekend. You should not also discount the mobility category as we have been doing around 25,000 rides daily via the Namma Yatri app," ONDC chief executive T Koshy told Moneycontrol.

Last month, the network onboarded mobility aggregation platform Namma Yatri which is open source and does not take any commission from drivers. ONDC has said this open mobility foundation will allow customers to book rides from multiple apps, and will also become multi-modal down the line where various modes of transportation — such as cabs, metro and buses — will be integrated into the app.

Talking about retail category orders, Koshy also said that while Bengaluru accounted for the highest number of orders on the network on most days, Delhi tended to top the tech hub on a few days.

ONDC went live in some pin codes of Bengaluru on September 30, and has since expanded to several cities — two of which including Bengaluru are in the beta stage, and 181 in the alpha stage.

"Be it PhonePe's Pincode, Paytm, Mystore or Magicpin, every player is trying to ramp up their orders on ONDC... Every buyer app will have their own strategies to bring their user bases to the network," he added.

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 85,000 currently — from around 800 in December  — after it launched an incentive scheme for seller-side apps to enroll merchants. Of the total seller base, 31,000 are from non-mobility categories like food, grocery, home decor and electronics.

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.