ONDC starts pilot to onboard street food vendors in Delhi, Lucknow

Over the past year-and-a-half, multiple new-age companies such as Paytm, Ola, PhonePe, Meesho, Magicpin and Shiprocket have taken to ONDC

The Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), a government-backed interoperable network, has initiated a pilot project aimed at bringing street food vendors in Delhi and Lucknow on board, as they aim to expand at a faster pace. The plan is to onboard 500 street food vendors in the next 1-2 months in Delhi and Lucknow. Following the pilot's success, the network will be scaled up nationwide with more seller and buyer apps.

There is also an effort to explore sustainable ways for demand generation with various buyer applications on the network. In Delhi, the pilot has started with Zomato-backed Magicpin, which has brought two street vendors in the Saket locality of the city - Krishna Chaat Bhandaar and Free Plates - to the network.

The e-commerce startup will provide the vendors with extensive training through its on-ground representatives, facilitate digitisation, and enable them to accept payments through mainstream banking channels. Once onboarded, vendors will gain access to the platform's 10 million users.

Anshoo Sharma, CEO and co-founder of Magicpin said, "We’re currently running a pilot initiative aimed at onboarding 500 FSSAI-accredited street vendors in Delhi and Lucknow within the next 3-6 months."

Meanwhile, the Zomato-funded company has also made a foray into logistics aggregation. It will act as an aggregator of its third-party logistics(3PL) partners such as Shadowfax, Dunzo, Rapido, Porter, OLA, and Zypp for backend supply, consolidating all 3PL services under one umbrella for brands and their sellers.

ONDC's growth goals

Moneycontrol reported earlier that ONDC's transaction volume grew 15 percent to over 7.5 million in February from the previous month.

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.

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 is looking to achieve a monthly run rate of up to 8 million transactions by the end of FY24.

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.