The government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) transaction volume grew 15 percent to over 7.5 million in February from the previous month, sources have told Moneycontrol.
The interoperable network clocked 6.5 million transactions in January. In effect, the average number of daily transactions on the network grew 23 percent to over 258,000 in February, which is a shorter month.
Of the 7.5 million transactions, 3.8 million were in the ride-hailing bucket via the Namma Yatri platform. The remaining 3.7 million were retail purchases.
The share of retail purchases in the total monthly transactions stands in stark contrast to early 2023, when it accounted for only 5-10 percent, with the mobility category dominating with 90-95 percent of all transactions.
ONDC declined to comment on the transaction numbers.
Make or break year
In 2023, ONDC focused on laying the groundwork for onboarding buyers, sellers and platforms, the year 2024 will be a crucial year for determining its scalability.
The network was looking to achieve a monthly run rate of up to 8 million transactions by the end of FY24, sources said. If the pace of growth holds, the goal looks achievable.
Over the past year-and-a-half, multiple new-age companies such as Paytm, Ola, PhonePe, Meesho, Magicpin and Shiprocket have taken to ONDC, aimed at breaking the stranglehold of a few players such as Amazon, Flipkart, Zomato and Swiggy on online retail in the country.
Sources said over 370,000 sellers and service providers, from top brands to farmers and taxi drivers are now on the network.
ONDC is operational in 588 “countable cities”, which are the cities or districts with more than 100 orders a month in the last 3 months. This is approximately 70 percent of cities in India. The platform has fulfilled transactions in over 800 cities in India.
Ride-hailing through ONDC is now live in seven cities Bengaluru, Mysuru, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Delhi, Chennai and Kochi. The launch of metro ticket booking on ONDC in Chennai is being seen as a crucial step towards multimodal mobility through the network.
Expanding the offerings
In January, ONDC successfully tested a couple of transactions for personal loans with Easypay and DMI Finance. With the technology being tested and optimised, other finserv participants are scheduled to go live over the next few weeks.
Within the financial services space, ONDC is building the infrastructure for three broad segments — credit, insurance and wealth management.
Its online dashboard shows that financial services players such as Aditya Birla Capital, Tata Capital, Canara Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Bajaj Finserv, Bajaj Allianz, Aditya Birla Health, etc are in various stages of integration with the network.
With ONDC, the government hopes to increase e-commerce penetration in the country to 25 percent in the next couple of years, reaching a gross merchandise value of $48 billion.
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