Commerce Minister, Piyush Gopal, praised Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) for having a significant number of sellers within a year of its completion. ONDC is the government’s open e-commerce project, that has seen a significant growth in merchants on the network.
The platform received praise from the minister at the ONDC Elevate, an event held to commemorate the one-year completion of the platform. Gopal claims that ONDC has a great impact on the reimagination of digital commerce.
The data shared at the event claims that ONDC now has 36,000 sellers on it since its launch on 29th September 2022. There are over 45 network participants spanning eight categories on the platform. The weekly average for retail orders is more than 13,000 and peak transactions reached 25,000 retail orders in a day, according to Gopal.
The CEO and MD of ONDC, T Koshy, claims that the network has evolved from being available in 5 cities to 236 cities with diverse participation from merchants.
Details shared in a statement by ONDC earlier this month claim that the network saw ‘quantum leaps especially in the last few months.’ This is noted to be true since the platform only had 800 registered sellers as of January 2023.
The network started off simply with the food delivery and grocery segment but since January 2023 has added personal care, beauty, fashion, electronics, and appliances. There are over 600 merchants who saw 1300 transactions in May alone.
Buyers, sellers, and logistics companies are some of the participants hosted by ONDC among others. The way the app works is that the buyer simply needs to search for a product on an app such as Paytm, and within seconds ONDC will connect the buyer to sellers having that product.
ONDC’s growth goes hand-in-hand with the digitization of MSME sellers. According to a report by consulting firm, Bain & Company in collaboration with Accel, a venture capital firm, more than 15 million MSMEs are taking up online trade compared to 6 million before. 7 million jobs are to be created by 2027 compared to 3 million jobs previously.
The online shopper base would consist of 400 to 450 million shoppers, with a gross merchandise value of over $350 billion, and an enterprise value of $400 to $500 billion.
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