ONDC to start beta testing in parts of Delhi on Nov 28, main focus on food delivery

Seller App, a company working to get merchants to join ONDC, is prioritizing D2C brands for the beta testing phase in Delhi, while its focus was on kirana stores during the Bangalore launch.

"Although we got a good response from kirana stores, they really need to be handed constantly as they adapt to digital media," said Dilip Vamanan, co-founder of SellerApp. We turned it on, it stayed active and gradually became more digitally savvy."

“Since you need to be in constant contact with them to help them transition, we would like to do this for less groceries in Delhi. On the other hand, the focus will be more on D2C, as Delhi is something of a D2C capital. ". We will have up to 25 players in D2C including Kapiva, Boyo, Three Clive Road and more. On the food side, restaurant digitization platform Uengage plans to set up 60 individual restaurants on board the network in Delhi. In the next two weeks, try to hit the 100 mark.

The four-year-old company sees its integration with ONDC as a logical extension of its core business model of providing restaurants with an alternative to food aggregators like Zomato and Swiggy for digital order taking, marketing automation and logistics management.

“We've created a do-it-yourself app that restaurants can fully download and upload in a matter of hours, depending on the size of their catalogues,” said Sameer Sharma, founder of Uengage.The structure of separate buying and selling platforms is one of the main differences between the closed-loop model of e-commerce and the open network model.

Since all the e-commerce platforms, from Amazon and Flipkart to Swiggy and Zomato, are now rendered in the old style, they can control which sellers feature in the listings and have closed user communities.
ONDC seeks to dismantle this structure into a standard form of e-commerce where any user on any platform can buy from any seller on any other platform.

Its goal is to increase e-commerce penetration in the next two years to 25 per cent of consumer purchases in India, from around 8 per cent today. It also expects to enroll 900 million buyers and 1.2 million sellers in the combined network over the next five years, while achieving a total merchandise value of $48 billion.

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