What is Open Network for Digital Commerce?
A week ago, the government created an advisory council to form Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC). The idea is to make the e-commerce process accessible to all retailers and curb monopolies via open source, which are not proprietary. Now a small retailer like Company A can either sell products online via existing platforms, which sellers have claimed to follow predatory pricing, or invest in its own platform, which might not be viable. ONDC aims to solve this problem. Though it is still in early stages, the idea is to replicate a unified payments interface (UPI) by standardising processes such as seller on-boarding, vendor and price discovery, and product cataloguing via open source.