Context: 

The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) went live with its Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) project on a limited scale.

• ONDC aims to provide small merchants and mom-and-pop stores access to technologies used by large e-commerce platforms.

Image Source: Economic Times

About ONDC:

• Commissioned by: DPIIT through the Quality Council of India (QCI). 
• Processes open-sourced with ONDC project:

• • Several operational aspects including onboarding of sellers, vendor discovery, price discovery ,and product cataloguing could be made open source on the lines of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

• How does this work?

• • The ONDC platform acts as a middleman between the buyer and the seller interfaces. 
  • Paytm hosts the buyer side interface, while other players like GoFrugal host the seller side interface. 
  • When a buyer searches for an item on the Paytm app, the app connects to the ONDC platform, which connects it to the seller side interfaces that list all the sellers that have listed that particular item. 
  • The ONDC also partners with logistics service providers, enterprise resource planners, and e-commerce store hosting service providers.

Benefits:

• Seller: Get an equal opportunity to compete with large market players and become discoverable online.
• Buyers: Enjoy a seamless shopping experience from a wide assortment of products across categories in a single checkout experience.
• Tech Companies: Rapid adoption of products and services and achieving scale in go-to-market efforts.
• FinTech: Provide credit and financing solutions to all entities engaged in e‑commerce.

News Source: The Indian Express