ONDC Is A New Way Of Doing Ecommerce & We Will Have To Unlearn A Lot: CBO Shireesh Joshi

Day 2 of The D2C Summit 3.0 began with the most awaited session of the summit titled “Can ONDC Unleash India’s Latent Ecommerce Potential?” ONDC’s chief business officer Shireesh Joshi started the conversation with a banger when he mentioned that ONDC is a new capability and not a new product.

“It is a very, very new way of doing things. 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. These behaviours will actually change or disappear completely,” he said.

What’s more, he stated that users need to be patient with themselves, to ‘soak it in’ and ‘that’s when the understanding will come too.’

The comment comes at a time when ONDC or the open network for digital commerce is touted as the revolutionary platform within India’s $300 Bn worth of ecommerce opportunity. The project has been delayed for public launch over and over, and sellers are still working in a closed, focus group of sorts.

Several analysts and industry experts have also commented that the open network will face a lot of complications before it either breaks the Indian ecommerce (vis-a-vis UPI to fintech) or fails to make a mark. 

In the first fireside session of Day 2 of the summit, Joshi first explained the entire ONDC phenomenon, and then answered questions from viewers (moderated by Capier Investment’s Ankur Pahwa). 

He also addressed the comparison of ONDC and UPI, and said, “ONDC and UPI are not exactly identical. It is to create a population scale inclusion so that any buyer, anywhere should be able to buy from any seller, anywhere in a very easy, simple way.”

Notably, the payments infrastructure had fewer components than ecommerce and only ONDC’s debut on the buyer-side of applications will make it clearer as to what to expect from the industry.

According to reports, ONDC aims to reach around 100 cities, 30 Mn sellers and 10 Mn vendors by the end of 2022 and is already piloting in 15 cities with around 100 sellers.

Further, several major ecommerce players (not just marketplaces, but auxiliaries) such as Flipkart, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, PhonePe, Ecom Express and more, are in various stages of integration with ONDC. The end goal is to take India’s ecommerce penetration from single digits to at least 40% of the total retail commerce in India. 

Before that, ONDC and its makers still have to answer several queries of the ecosystem stakeholders, including major ones such as data privacy, the dominion of ecommerce players and addressing on-ground awareness about the network.