ONDC is here to break the monopoly of E-commerce giants and democratize the E-commerce sage. A market and community-led network, Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) aims to develop an inclusive, open, and competitive marketplace where buyers and sellers don’t need to be on the same platform. They can conduct business from anywhere if registered with ONDC. This open-source network lets users enjoy digital visibility and conduct transactions regardless of whether they have registered an app or platform.
As you are here, you might have confusion between the ONDC network and E-commerce platforms. Well, it’s an obvious question hitting your mind.
In this post, we will put forth a detailed comparison between ONDC and other E-commerce platforms. So, stick to the end to get answers to all your relevant queries that are essential to know and make the best use of this newly emerged landscape of digital commerce.
Before we start with the comparison, let’s get deeper and extract details about ONDC to make the best choice.
What is ONDC?
Today, where E-commerce marketplace platforms follow a platform-centric business model, they need to hold end-to-end control over the complete E-commerce transaction process, starting from seller onboarding, customer acquisition, order fulfillment, apt complaint redressal, and payment management, ONDC gets in breaking down this complex online shopping process into individual microservices that can be conducted separately by any of the participants that choose to conduct such activities.
The ONDC platform stands in the middle of interfaces hosting both parties, buyers and sellers. When buyers search for an item to buy online on the buyer app, the app will get linked to the ONDC platform connected to the seller-side interface listing all the sellers selling that specific item.
Current Live Categories of ONDC
- Food & Beverages
- Grocery
- Home and Decor
Companies Already Enjoying Benefits of ONDC
| Buyer Side | PayTM, Mystore, IDFC, Spice Money, Kotak, and Craftsvilla. |
| Seller Side | eSamudaay, Digiit, Go Frugal Technologies, Growth Falcons, Sansung, PetPooja, eVital, NowFloats, Enstore, Zoho, GlobalLinker, Sellerapp, etc. |
| Logistic Service Providers | Dunzo, Shiprocket, EcomExpress, eKart, Grab, and Load Share. |
Difference Between ONDC & E-commerce Platforms
| Parameters | E-commerce Platforms | ONDC |
|---|---|---|
| Downloading E-commerce App | Buyers need to download such an app to purchase online. | Buyers will soon shop online without downloading an app. |
| Platform-Centric Model | E-commerce stores run on the platform-centric model that demands buyers and sellers to use the same online trading platform to connect and conduct business. | ONDC is an open-network model that lets merchants and customers run transactions regardless of the platforms and apps they use. |
| Hyper Local Network | E-commerce platforms lack such a trading system. | With ONDC, users can reap the advantages of hyper-local choice that assists in connecting with local stores of specific geographical regions to provide customers better shopping experience, including a financial services stack and embedded payment. |
| Current Categories | E-commerce platforms provide varied options in almost all the available categories, be it fashion, beauty, healthcare, or any. | ONDC has kick-started with three categories, F&B, groceries, and home decor. |
| Ownership | Mostly varied online shopping stores are privately owned by the specific entity where business owners provide the details of seller policies and terms of services to boost the company’s revenue | Any business entity or agency does not regulate ONDC because it’s not an app or service. Instead, this network is a backend E-commerce network where suppliers, buyers, logistics, and payment portals connect via a set of open-source protocols. |
| Onboarding Fee | E-commerce platforms charge a hefty amount as a fee to get the sellers and SMBs onboard. | On the contrary, ONDC is cost-friendly that demands just a 4-10 times less fraction of the cost that the E-commerce platform charges that the market dictates, not the government. |
| Number of Options for Buyers & Sellers | Currently, 500+ logistics brands and 20k+ active businesses are offering services on E-commerce platforms. Resultantly, only a handful of sellers come in the search results repeatedly, which limits the options for buyers. | On the counterpart, the ONDC seller app lets the buyers filter their preferred sellers and get the relevant results from them. This unveils many options for buyers and sellers that also boost their experiences. |
| Transferable Seller Reviews | If the merchants are running their store on one platform and wish to start selling on another, they would have to restart from zero. The reviews and ratings they earned by performing expectedly for years will stay stuck in their previous store. | But ONDC appears as a savior in this case. If you want to migrate your store to this open-source network, you can do that seamlessly by reaping the benefits of transferable reviews and ratings. These will be visible to buyers and help them make informed decisions. |
Current Challenges ONDC is Encountering
1. Buyers’ Outlook
- Customer Experience
The UI of the buyers’ app in the ONDC network needs improvement to boost the customer experience as E-commerce platforms are ruling this parameter right now.
- Certain Growing Issues
ONDC users are still facing problems because of partial returns, bad grievance redressal, and longer delivery times.
- Raising Neighborhood Enrolling Problems
ONDC unlocks the doors for neighborhood retailers to enroll and sell online. Thus, it’s cropping up varied issues relevant to inventory updating, digital adoption, and quality. Resultantly, who will bear the losses? Everyone needs to stay ready for that.
- Poor Inventory Management
Per the records, ONDC currently holds numerous unfulfilled orders placed by buyers, and the reason behind this is inaccurate inventory management by SMEs.
2. Sellers’ Outlook
- Lack of Discounts, Lucrative Offers, & Discounts
E-commerce giants stay ahead of the curve when it comes to offering amazing discounts and increased sales. With ONDC, local sellers would find it challenging to compete with such brands in providing attractive offers in the long run.
How Can Emizentech Help You?
The online sellers already running their businesses on E-commerce platforms find it challenging to shift to the ONDC network. Also, they face issues migrating their product catalog and essentials to opt for this dig commerce network. Here, merchants and business owners should consider hiring an E-commerce development company that may conduct the migration and even ONDC implementation seamlessly with no data loss.
Here you can surely trust Emizentech. It has a team of experienced and expert developers with a proven track record of migrating and integrating clients’ online stores to the ONDC network into their businesses.
Final Note
After going through this post, you might have learned various unknown facts about ONDC and how this network can benefit you in expanding your customer base. Let you know that the story doesn’t end here. With time and the advancement of new technologies and trends, this open-source network will showcase noticeable improvement and will surely catch up with the vision of resolving the issues merchants face with traditional E-commerce.
Connect to an E-commerce development company today!
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