ONDC's daily retail transactions top 1 lakh for sixth day running

Till last month, the peak for non-mobility transactions was over 96,000, but it had not touched 100,000

The Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) crossed 1,00,000 non-mobility daily transactions a day for the sixth day in a row on January 16, sources said, indicating the growing acceptability of the government's e-commerce platform.

Until December, the highest such transactions, across categories like fashion, food, electronics and grocery recorded, in a day were over 96,000 but they never touched 1,00,000.

The introduction of gift cards as a stock-keeping unit (SKU) on the government-backed network could have given a fillip to the transaction volume along with growing familiarity of the users with ONDC and new sellers.

For instance, earlier this week, that pizza chain Domino’s went live on ONDC in some parts of Delhi-NCR through PhonePe’s Pincode app, as reported by Moneycontrol.

ONDC did not respond to Moneycontrol’s queries on the matter.

ONDC crossed 5 million transactions in a month across ride-hailing and retail purchases for the first time in December.

Of the 5.5 million transactions, 2.1 million were in the retail category, while 3.4 million were in the mobility category. Within the retail segment, food delivery and fashion purchases each accounted for a third of the 2.1 million orders, with the remaining transactions were spread across newer categories like cosmetics and electronics.

The current share of retail purchases stands in stark contrast to the early 2023 when they accounted for only 5-10 percent, while the mobility category dominated with 90-95 percent of all ONDC transactions.

Retail purchases on ONDC grew more than 1,700 times within a span of 11 months — from 1,281 in January to 2.1 million in December.

The network’s mobility transactions on the Namma Yatri app have been consistently averaging 1 lakh daily for the last couple of months. Earlier this week, the app went live in Delhi.

ONDC is being seen as an answer to Swiggy and Zomato's dominance in food delivery, Ola and Uber in ride-hailing and Amazon and Flipart in online retail.

According to ONDC, lower commissions on the network will translate to more affordable prices, as sellers like restaurants, grocery shops and electronics brands are expected to pass on the benefits to the consumers.

While in 2023 the focus was on laying the groundwork for ONDC by onboarding a substantial initial wave of buyers, sellers and platforms, 2024 will be a crucial year in determining its scalability.

To this end, the government-backed network plans to ramp up its efforts significantly over the coming months, aiming to achieve a monthly run rate of up to 8 million transactions by the end of FY24, sources said.

In November, Paytm founder and chief executive officer Vijay Shekhar Sharma said ONDC would open up the e-commerce opportunity for a lot of players as it breaks down different parts of a transaction such as seller, logistics, and payment into separate parts. In effect, a single player doesn’t need large amounts of funding to build all the parts to break into the ecosystem.

Sharma said that 11.8 million users had already shopped on ONDC through Paytm and promised to bring 10 million merchants to the network by the end of 2025.

With ONDC, the government hopes to increase e-commerce penetration in the country to 25 percent in the next two years, reaching a gross merchandise value of $48 billion.