ONDC To Build A Reputation Ledger To Allow People To Understand & Trust Sellers

Speaking at The D2C Summit 3.0, the CBO of open network for digital commerce (ONDC) Shireesh Joshi spoke about the ‘trust’ factor on the network. He stated that by democratising ecommerce, the network asks the sellers to bring their existing trust to ONDC, so the network starts with building trust.

He exemplified the situation with the trust factor on larger ecommerce platforms and said, “Even on India’s largest ecommerce platform, you actually trust the reputation of the seller. Say, you search for an item and find a seller who has a 2.5 rating, you will not buy matter what you think of the platform. Because it’s the reputation that matters”

He added that of the total buyers of a product, very few people rate the products. Even they do it when there is a problem. With ONDC, the network also plans on creating a reputation ledger where it will build the ‘trust’ factor for every seller on certain parameters. 

These include (and are not limited to) how often their shipments have complaints and what percentage of those complaints get resolved, KYC and authentication of sellers. 

“We are working on creating a composite reputation ledger that people will be able to understand and trust. You should anticipate over time that a much greater trust will get built on ONDC than you’ll see on ecommerce platforms,” he said.

In a roundabout way, he also added that it is entirely upto the buyers on trusting their platforms. One of the examples that he gave was a buyer trusting a Kirana store closer to her place than hyperlocal delivery platforms. Joshi acknowledged that the aggregation part of ONDC is being executed by several players, but it is not interoperable.

Talking about trust over pricing and the possibility of deep discounting, Joshi stated that the openness of the network and the universality of the product and service catalogue will make ONDC unbeatable and that user behaviour will change.

“Different context drives a different behaviour,” he concluded. “The interest in discounting is currently driven because ecommerce is currently a closed network.”

The changes that ONDC will bring to the online shopping experience is a much talked about topic. However, there is a lot of interest in its working and operations and the initial challenges it is likely to face.

Besides ONDC, Inc42’s ‘The D2C Summit 3.0’ conversed on several topics ranging from brand building, customer engagement and funding challenges. If you missed out on the sessions of the two-day summit, you can watch the recordings.