New Delhi: The government has launched a new type of e-commerce platform Open Network for Digital Commerce i.e. ONDC. ONDC is now open to the general public in Bangalore. ONDC was launched on a pilot basis by the government in April this year. At present ONDC has been opened for 16 pin code areas of Bengaluru. In the first phase of the trial, more than 200 grocery stores and restaurants have been connected to this network.
People associated with ONDC say that users in Bangalore will not be connected to the network in this beta testing, but this work will be completed in a phased manner. Kotak Mahindra Bank and IDFC First Bank are also expected to go live for users on this network in the next week.
Till now the network was limited to the users
T Koshy, CEO and MD, ONDC, said that till now under the pilot program this network was limited to a select few users. The launch of its beta testing in Bangalore is a big step towards its full implementation. We will try to make this network even better based on the feedback received from the users.
He said, “We will have to wait a bit for the network to fully function. But, like the popular dialogue of Star Trek, we are going to a place no one has been to before.” In this trial of Bangalore, Paytm, MyStore, and Spice Money have been added as buyer-side apps. With this, users can use this network to place orders by signing up on these apps.
Working on making things easier
Dilip Vamanan, the co-founder of seller onboarding platform SellerApp, said, “We have worked hard to make things easy in the back-end. Last night we found that our server is in the US, due to which the latency has increased. So we have to shift the server to India. This will help us bring down the latency from 300 milliseconds to 50 milliseconds.
These merchants connected to the network
The network will host a roster of 11 seller-side apps including grocery merchants, food and beverage outlets, and consumer packaging goods (CPG) brands. These will include Unilever uShop, Google, SellerApp, GrowthFalcons, EnStore, and Innobits among many brands.
