📑 Table of Contents
- Loading headings…
Ask a small Indian brand how to sell online and the answer used to be two names: Amazon and Flipkart. Along with reach came 15-30% commissions, pay-to-play ads and a customer relationship the marketplace owned, not you. In 2026 there is a third door. The Open Network for Digital Commerce has crossed 500 million cumulative orders, and it works nothing like a marketplace.
What ONDC actually is
ONDC is best understood as the UPI of commerce. UPI did not become a payments app; it became a common rail that any app could plug into. ONDC does the same for buying and selling: it is an open, interoperable network where a buyer on one app can purchase from a seller on a completely different app.
ONDC is an open, interoperable network that enables buyers and sellers to transact across multiple platforms without being tied to any single application. It is not a platform, application or a marketplace.
Ministry of Commerce and Industry, reply in the Lok Sabha, 2026
The network itself is a Section 8 not-for-profit company. It sets the protocols; private players build the apps. On one side sit buyer apps like Paytm, PhonePe’s Pincode and magicpin. On the other sit seller apps (called seller network participants) that onboard merchants, digitise their catalogs and push them to the whole network. Logistics providers ride the same rail for delivery.
How a small seller gets on
You never “join ONDC” directly. You join through a seller app, and the process looks like this:
- Pick a seller network participant. Compare their commission, catalog tools and support. This choice sets your per-order cost.
- Get your documents ready. GSTIN (where applicable), PAN, bank account and pickup address.
- Digitise your catalog. Photos, prices, stock. Good seller apps help you shoot and list products.
- Choose fulfilment. Deliver yourself for nearby orders, or use on-network logistics partners for the rest.
- Go live everywhere at once. Your products become visible to buyers on every buyer app on the network, not just one marketplace’s traffic.
The government is actively greasing this on-ramp. The DigiDukaan initiative onboards kirana and retail traders in Hyderabad and Jaipur, and the World Bank-supported MSME TEAM initiative has an outlay of ₹277.35 crore for FY 2024-25 to FY 2026-27 to bring micro and small enterprises onto ONDC, with half the beneficiaries targeted to be women-owned businesses.
Where ONDC still falls short
The network is real, but it is not magic. Food delivery and grocery drive most order volume; categories like fashion and electronics are still thin. Discovery is weaker than a marketplace’s search page, ratings and returns processes vary by app, and nobody yet wakes up wanting to “open ONDC” the way they open Amazon.
Important: treat ONDC as a second channel, not a replacement. Keep your marketplace presence while you test which of your products move on the open network, and watch your per-order economics on both. The sellers who win are the ones who measure, not the ones who pick a side.
Why it matters for your first customers
The strategic point is bigger than commissions. On a marketplace, you rent the customer. On an open network, the relationship and the data are closer to yours, and no single platform can change the algorithm and halve your business overnight. For a new brand, that is the difference between building on rented land and building on your own. Pair this with the scrappy acquisition tactics in Your First 100 Customers, and the voice-first Bharat opportunity, and you have a distribution story no single platform controls.
A worked example: one ₹500 order, two rails
Say you sell a ₹500 box of homemade masala. The exact fees vary by category and app, but the shape of the math looks like this in 2026 (illustrative):
- On a marketplace: 15-30% commission depending on category, plus closing and shipping fees, plus ads if you want to be seen. You might keep ₹300-350, and the marketplace owns the customer relationship, the data and the re-marketing rights.
- On ONDC: your seller app charges its fee, typically in the single digits to low teens, plus logistics at network rates. You keep more per order, and you can switch seller apps without losing your catalog or your presence on the network.
Neither rail is automatically cheaper for every product, which is why you measure both. But the structural difference is permanent: on a marketplace you are a tenant, on an open network you are a participant.
The UPI parallel, properly drawn
Before UPI, every wallet was a walled garden: money in one app could not move to another. UPI made payments interoperable, and the app layer became a commodity. ONDC is the same bet for commerce. The global parallel is email: Gmail users can email Outlook users because both speak SMTP. ONDC wants “Amazon buyer purchases from local-kirana catalog” to be equally unremarkable. The network has already expanded from retail into mobility, logistics, financial services and agriculture, which is where the 10 lakh+ service providers on the network come from.
Tracking India’s commerce rails? The Weekly Founder Brief breaks down one big move every week in plain words. Subscribe on foundNXT.
Sources
FoundNXT publishes independent business intelligence, valuation frameworks, and startup teardowns. Nothing in this article constitutes financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. Company figures, market projections, and valuation metrics represent editorial estimates and regulatory filings. Always consult qualified legal counsel and certified financial advisors before executing investment rounds or financial agreements.
