Monthly transactions on ONDC to hit around 50 million by the end of the year: CEO Koshy
ONDC’s Koshy noted decreasing share in mobility as beauty, fashion and home segments pick up trade on the open network.
Open Network For Digital Commerce CEO Thampy Koshy says he is confident in making 40-50 million monthly transactions on the ONDC platform by the end of this year.
In a media roundtable, the ONDC CEO noted “I am confident that by the end of the year I will make at least 40-50 million in a month...that is what I am pushing my team to.”
ONDC is a government initiative that enables smaller businesses to harness the power of ecommerce against it being exclusively used by industry giants. Since being launched in December 2021, it gathered 1,000 transactions in January 2023 while this month the network recorded 8.5 million transactions.
Koshy, also noted that the platform has nearly 5.5 lakh merchants, with a majority of them coming from the mobility sector which includes names like Namma Yatri, West Bengal-based Yatri Saathi, and Pune-based O-Rickshaw among others. In terms of overall transactions on the network, Koshy said that about "45% of our transaction is mobility, it used to be 95%, but it has come down below.”
He highlighted the decreasing share of mobility in its monthly transactions as other players in food, beauty, grocery, and apparel have picked up pace. “Food will be about 30% only, and grocery will be another 15-20%, rest are coming from other products, like beauty, personal care, home and kitchen, electronics, and they are (were) all started in the last 3-4 months," he said.
"As one of the first VCs to go deep into ONDC, we continue to be bullish on its game-changing potential to drive e-commerce growth in India," Susmit Patodia, Associate Partner and Lead of Digital Public Infrastructure initiatives at Antler in India said.
The comments were made at the conclusion event for its Build For Bharat initiative which was conducted in partnership with Startup India, Google Cloud India, Antler in India, Protean, and Paytm.
The initiative, launched in December 2023, aimed to crowdsource innovative solutions to complex business problems prevalent in the ecommerce sector. It involved more than 27k participants along with top experts, leaders, Venture Capitalists, and incubators.
The initiative was structured around three different categories to tackle problems associated with digital commerce, under its ‘NextGen Ventures’ startups like Shopeg, OmniFlo, Zepic, Upaz, DPI Corp, and Zceppa — emerged as winners, and each team took home non-equity grants of up to $40,000. Some eligible winners also stand to get an opportunity to be inducted into the Antler India Residency Program, with equity funding of up to $250K.
Edited by Affirunisa Kankudti