Google Said to Be in Talks to Integrate With E-Commerce Network ONDC

Alphabet Google is in talks with the Indian authorities to combine its purchasing providers with the nation’s open e-commerce community ONDC, two sources conversant in the matter instructed Reuters.

India soft-launched its Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) late final month as the federal government tries to finish the dominance of US corporations Amazon.com and Walmart within the fast-growing e-commerce market.

The authorities estimates the Indian e-commerce market was value greater than $55 billion (roughly Rs. 4,27,031 crore) in gross merchandise worth in 2021 and can develop to $350 billion (roughly Rs. 27,17,470 crore) by the tip of this decade.

ONDC Chief Executive T. Koshy instructed Reuters that Google was certainly one of many corporations it was in discussions with to be related to the venture.

Google’s talks observe the success of its funds enterprise due to the federal government’s initiative for monetary transactions, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), stated one of many sources, each of whom declined to be recognized as they weren’t authorised to debate the matter with the media.

Google’s present purchasing enterprise works solely as an aggregator of listings on-line and would not perform any order fulfilment like supply, which the likes of Amazon do.

A Google spokesperson declined to touch upon whether or not it was in talks with the federal government.

“We remain committed to focus on the enablement of small and medium businesses to leverage digital for deeper discovery and payments capabilities with Google Pay,” the spokesperson stated, referring to its funds service.

Partners of the ONDC venture, which at present consists of the likes of Indian fintech agency Paytm, will present listings from one another on their platforms in search outcomes. The authorities’s goal is to stage the taking part in area by lowering the price of doing enterprise for any vendor who needs to listing their merchandise on-line.

Some business executives, nevertheless, have raised considerations over how listings from completely different sellers shall be prioritised.

“The logic would be that the highest sellers/best rated sellers will probably get displayed first, which means it will not be a level-playing field,” stated Mahesh Narayanan, a former head of Google’s cellular advertisements enterprise in India.

The ONDC programme goals to hitch 30 million sellers and 10 million retailers on-line, and canopy at the least 100 cities and cities by August.

Caesar Sengupta, the chief govt of monetary know-how startup Arbo Works who performed a essential position in establishing Google Pay in India, stated he sees massive potential with ONDC.

“One thing ONDC will definitely need is a consumer player to drive adoption with the masses,” he stated. “You may remember that UPI had only 17 million transactions per month before Google Pay launched and the graph thereafter is a hockey stick.”

© Thomson Reuters 2022