ONDC To Bring UP-ODOP Products In Bengaluru From Coming Week

T Koshy, the chief executive of the government’s ambitious ecommerce project, the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), said that the project would be bringing UP One District One Product (UP-ODOP) products to Bengaluru in the coming week.

In his LinkedIn post, the ONDC CEO also announced that D2C logistics unicorn Shiprocket is now live on the government’s digital commerce project as well.

UP-ODOP is a programme by the Uttar Pradesh government that aims to encourage the production and sales of indigenous products from each of the 75 districts of the state. Some examples of such products include wheat-stalk craft, chikankari and zari-zardozi work on clothes.

“Shiprocket has gone live on ONDC network making intercity delivery a reality in ONDC,” said Koshy. He added that until now, ONDC was focused on hyperlocal (with Loadshare and Dunzo).

ONDC is also in the process of onboarding Ekart Logistics, ecommerce major Flipkart’s logistics arm, to supplement intercity deliveries across India.

“Now we will have merchants onboarded who can offer goods across cities where Shiprocket has delivery capability which as explained by Shiprocket team covers practically all pin codes in India,” said Koshy.

Koshy wrote, “With this development, we expect the UP-ODOP products to be available across the country soon through SellerApp,” referring to the onboarding of Shiprocket on ONDC.

Currently, five buyer apps live in Bengaluru, including — Craftsvilla, IDFC First Bank, Mystore, Paytm and Spice Money. Of these five, Craftsvilla, Mystore and Spice Money, would be bringing UP-ODOP products to Bengaluru from the next week onwards. 

The ONDC CEO did not indicate whether Paytm and IDFC First Bank would also jump on the bandwagon.

The network was thrown open to the public on September 30 across 16 pin codes of Bengaluru, as part of ONDC’s beta testing across the country. On the first day, customers in Bengaluru placed only 161 orders, with 55% being food and beverage orders.

At The D2C Summit 3.0, ONDC’s chief business officer Shireesh Joshi said, “For more than a decade, we were used to doing ecommerce a certain way. We have to unlearn a lot of behaviour and practices that we have taken for granted and have become second nature to ecommerce.” However, seller readiness for such a move still remains a question.

Apart from initiation and adoption issues, there are also problems related to opaqueness in pricing and clarity among sellers.

While the government sees promise in what ONDC could be capable of, there are still multiple issues that need to be addressed before the network comes out of beta testing.