As the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) looks to broaden its base to gain a stronger foothold in the hinterlands, data showed that four states placed at least a million retail orders each in the June quarter and 17 of them crossed 100,000 purchases during the period.
As per data, Delhi saw the highest number of retail orders at 1.46 million in the June quarter, followed by Karnataka at 1.29 million, Uttar Pradesh at 1.22 million, and Maharashtra at 1.19 million.
Below the million-orders-mark, Telangana was in the pole position with about 544000 orders, followed by Rajasthan at about 387000 orders, West Bengal at about 384000 orders, and Tamil Nadu at about 317,000. The states that had the lowest traction were mostly in the Northeast, except Assam, which saw about 136,000 transactions during the period. Interestingly, even Jammu and Kashmir contributed over a lakh purchases at about 115,000.
During the quarter, the network had seen a total of over 13.2 million orders from 799 districts of the country, involving 152,328 sellers.
Over the past few quarters, ONDC has been rejigging financial subsidies given to network participants so that tier 2 and 3 geographies see a surge in demand and supply on the network. However, the government-backed network had embarked on a plan to cut incentives by as much as 75 percent in some cases by September.
Meanwhile, sources said that ONDC is working on a fresh incentive structure and marketing strategies that are aimed at making the adoption more broad-based across the length and breadth of the country.
"The scheme will again be recast to stimulate widespread transactions. Now there will be a shift of gear to focus on broadening . It may have some short term impact, but that is okay. We are not in the business of maximising profit for shareholders or increasing valuation. We are in it for adoption and inclusion," said a person close to the developments.
"Now, there are about half a million transactions in a day on ONDC which is comparable to established platforms. If you look at the total number of e-commerce transactions on established platforms in a day, it would be around 13-14 million. As such, half a million a day is a good number as of now. It shows that ONDC works. Now, it has to be broad-based," the person added.
Another factor driving ONDC transactions now is on-network logistics. Until a few months back, most of the orders placed on ONDC were delivered by sellers off the network. However, this has changed rapidly as logistic services provided on the network by companies like Ola, Loadshare, Pidge, Shadowfax contributed to 1.1 million orders in June, up from fewer than 50,000 in March.
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 in the domestic online retail space.
With ONDC, the government hopes to increase e-commerce penetration in the country to 25 percent over the next couple of years, reaching a gross merchandise value of $48 billion.
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