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Digital Public Goods
Good time to talk about digital public goods in India and what ONDC is all about:
ONDC stands for Open Network for Digital Commerce. It is a special purpose vehicle (SPV) setup as a not for profit company. The ownership structure is similar to NPCI 1/n
ONDC stands for Open Network for Digital Commerce. It is a special purpose vehicle (SPV) setup as a not for profit company. The ownership structure is similar to NPCI 1/n
ONDC was born out of a few movements - “Atma Nirbhar”, Anti-big tech etc. The Govt of India, under the ministry of commerce started listening to the problems of small businesses in India. One of their biggest problems have been deep discounting, predatory commissions etc. 2/n
To solve this, the govt. setup a high level committee which includes the likes of @NandanNilekani @rssharma3 @dilipasbe and may other industry veterans from the retail/restaurant association of India to figure out what can be done to solve this? 3/n
The big idea of ONDC is to unbundle the current model of e-commerce marketplaces. Today, they own both “seller ecosystem” and “buyer ecosystem”- This is pretty how much mobile wallets operated; What if they can be unbundled and become interoperable? 4/n
This is where @BecknProtocol comes in. A small team of folks under the leadership of @pramodkvarma have been thinking about it at a protocol layer since 2018. What if we built standard APIs for commerce? What would that look like? 5/n
Just like how UPI enables users to send money from App A to a merchant who is using App B, can this be done for e-commerce too? And the answer was: Why not? It is an order at the end of the day. Just like how UPI is “Payments markup language”, beckn can be thought of..6/n
As a markup language for commerce. The core set of APIs are very simple: Search, Order, Fulfillment and Services. We are working on building this infra at @Setu_API , you can check out our staging API docs here: staging.docs.setu.co 7/n
So what is the value proposition here? For sellers: It is very simple, it’s omnichannel commerce. Commerce 1.0 - Sell thru offline stores, Commerce 2.0 - Have your own website, Commerce 3.0 - Go to marketplaces (FK/Amazon), Commerce 4.0 - ONDC. 8/n
If we look at the most pressing problem of SMEs today - getting new business is on top of everything else! So ONDC will naturally be a pull product for them, as they will love getting new orders from customers/markets they were not able to service before 9/n
From a buyers perspective, it makes shopping more easy for us. Payment apps like - PhonePe, Gpay will enable commerce from within their apps. Imagine, being able to order grocery/milk/iPhone/Shirt from these apps and the order is received by merchant on Shopify or Khatabook 10/n
This is the power of interoperability. There can be a bunch of companies who can focus on building the “Seller ecosystem” and bunch of companies who can focus on building the “buyer ecosystem”. They interact with each other through interoperable APIs. 11/n
Just to clarify, beckn is the protocol layer and ONDC is a run time version or adaptation of the protocol. There is a LOT more to unpack on how this works - including how cascading transactions of logistics happen. Will do that another day. 12/n
We are building India’s first infra layer for ONDC. If you’re someone who’s keen to participate in the ecosystem or want to bring your merchants/seller base to ONDC, please write to us on ondc@setu.co to be part of the early pilots. /fin
Oh, and we’re hiring full stack + backend + front end engineers for ONDC project. Please write to us on careers@setu.co with subject line: Want to revolutionise commerce in India
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