ONDC Limits Discounts To INR 100 Per Order In New Incentive Regime

Even as order volumes continue to fall, the government’s Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) has introduced a new incentive scheme for buyer and seller apps which limits the discounts to INR 100 per order.

The new incentive regime is coming into effect on Thursday (June 1) and will continue until June 28.

To avail of the INR 100 discount on ONDC, a user will have to place a minimum order of INR 200 for a food and beverage purchase, and INR 300 for all the other products, including shipping charges. The discounts are only applicable if the discount value does not exceed 50% of the total order value, including shipping charges.

Further limiting the discounts, the ONDC said that a buyer can only use the discount for up to five transactions per month. On the other hand, a buyer app can only offer up to 20 discounted offers per brand per day.

For instance, if a user is ordering from a restaurant, they might find their discount ineligible because there have already been 20 orders before the said user.

Along with this, if the number of discounted orders crosses 1,000 for a buyer app, the app has to ensure that the number of orders for which it can claim incentive in the week should not exceed more than 50% of overall delivered orders in the week.

The move comes as ONDC said it is averaging around 9,000 orders per day, around 64% down from the peak of 25,000 orders achieved earlier this month.

The discount cap comes when ONDC is touted as a serious competitor to the duopoly of Zomato and Swiggy, the two incumbents in India’s food delivery market.

Inc42 had earlier discovered a huge price gap between products listed on the two foodtech majors and ONDC, which is largely down to lower commissions on the government-backed digital commerce network.

However, with the discount cap coming into force starting tomorrow, the price gap might be reduced a bit.

ONDC’s Incentives For Seller Onboarding

To introduce more variety of products on the network, ONDC has also formulated a new incentive regime to reward seller apps for onboarding merchants across six categories including F&B, grocery and health and wellness.

In the F&B category, a seller app will be eligible for an incentive of INR 1,000 per seller for the number of sellers onboarded during the programme duration. The incentive will be eligible provided the sellers have a minimum of 25 eligible SKUs.

A seller app will also get up to INR 5,000 per seller onboarded between June 1 and June 28 in the grocery category, depending on the number of eligible SKUs a seller has.

For all the other categories, the incentive will remain at INR 1,000 per new seller onboarded during the programme duration. The seller apps will only be eligible for claiming incentives for up to 1,000 new sellers.