India Eyes Interoperable Network To Thwart Oligopolistic Tendencies Of Influential E-commerce Platforms

India eyed a government-backed e-commerce initiative to challenge the dominance of the likes of Amazon.com Inc AMZN and Walmart Inc WMT-owned Flipkart in one of the fastest-growing online shopping markets.
Open Network for Digital Commerce, a non-profit company set up by India's commerce ministry, held trials in more than 85 cities, including the tech hub of Bangalore, ahead of a nationwide launch next year, Financial Times reports.
ONDC is an "interoperable" network where buyers and sellers can transact regardless of the apps or services.
ONDC would allow a customer using Paytm to search, order groceries from a vendor registered to another platform, like eSamudaay, and ship the order via an alternative forum, like Dunzo, that can do it at the fastest and lowest rate.
Thampy Koshy, ONDC's CEO, also says it can provide an alternative to the oligopolistic tendencies of large e-commerce platforms.
With ONDC, "everybody will have to compete on what they have to offer, not the captive user base that they have."
India capitalized on tools like UPI and ONDC to expand the reach of Indian e-commerce and remove the high barriers to entry.
But analysts found challenges ahead for ONDC. "The problem with this is UPI is the movement of money from one digital wallet to another," said Satish Meena, an independent analyst. "In this case, it's physical goods. This is very difficult to execute on the ground."
Meena was also skeptical that ONDC would break up oligopolies, pointing out that tech giants like Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL Google, and Walmart-owned PhonePe now dominate UPI transaction market share.
While Paytm has joined ONDC, Amazon and Flipkart are not yet live on the platform, though they have publicly indicated that they will join.
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Comments

Popular Channels

Tools & Features

Partners & Contributors

About Benzinga