Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) : Democratizing Digital Commerce and curbing digital monopolies in India

Global digital commerce is reshaping the global business environment and has the potential to provide a more level playing field that is more welcoming to all types of businesses. It has the potential to open up opportunities in the economy for new groups of players, particularly for smaller businesses. COVID-19 has facilitated the growth of digital commerce throughout the world. Although digital commerce in mobility and travel services declined, it grew in the retail sector, where its proportion of total retail sales has increased. The increase in sales can be attributed to an increase in business-to-consumer (B2C) sales. This is especially evident in sales of household essentials, medical supplies, as well as food products online. Additionally, COVID-19 resulted in increased business-to-business (B2B) digital commerce. The current version of eCommerce stifles innovation and also creates substantial barriers to access for novice players. Industry analysts have found feasible solutions for managing the bottlenecks within India's digital commerce ecosystem. Taking ideas from the presently successful model solutions such as the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), HTTP (protocols for data communication and browsing), and so on, the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) has actually been developed to revolutionize digital commerce within India. It is going to be an open network developed on open protocols based on open-source standards with set registries, enabling wide-scale involvement by digital commerce ecosystem players within India via multiple gateways. The Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) project is intended to curb digital monopolies. ONDC will offer a level playing field for big and small digital commerce applications and platforms via the possibility to be ONDC permitted and make buyers and sellers registered with all of them visible as well as discoverable. ONDC aims to make e-commerce procedures open source, thus creating a platform that can be utilized by all online retailers. This paper intends to provide a summary of the context, underlying principles, as well as building blocks for the advancement and operation of ONDC. It also provides an overview of what ONDC can do to help the various players in the digital commerce ecosystem.