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Paytm to bring 10 mn sellers to ONDC by 2025 end, says Vijay Shekhar Sharma

"Consumer value (on ONDC) will be dramatically different and superior to current e-commerce platforms," he said

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder, Chairman & CEO - One97 Communications (Paytm), BFSI Summit

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder, Chairman & CEO - One97 Communications (Paytm)

Aryaman Gupta New Delhi

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Payments major Paytm will onboard as many as 10 million of its merchants onto the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) platform by the end of 2025, said the company’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Vijay Shekhar Sharma at the launch of ONDC's 'Build for Bharat' initiative on Monday.

Around 11.8 million users have already shopped on ONDC via Paytm. The new merchants, Sharma said, would further fuel demand from consumers on the Network.

"If we bring a large number of merchants to the ONDC platform, demand will automatically increase," he said.

Sharma claimed that ONDC has become a significant player in e-commerce, with one-fifth of the 50 million e-commerce users in India now transacting on the platform.
 

The Paytm founder added that monolith e-commerce systems create a lot of overheads. The ONDC platform breaks down different parts of the consumer experience such as sellers, logistics, payments, customer care, etc., which brings down these costs.

“Consumer value (on ONDC) will be dramatically different and superior to current e-commerce platforms,” he said.

Paytm was the first buyer-side app to join ONDC back in September last year.

Sharma said that further integration of Paytm onto ONDC will be in a profitable manner.

“It is more or less about the technology which, once built, can be used many times. It is inherently profitable, unless we start spending money on acquiring consumer market share, which we are not planning to do. We do not plan to spend any more than what our consumer spends already are,” he said.

ONDC is a non-profit platform set up by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) as an alternative for online shopping. The Network is not an app, but a facilitative platform designed to “revolutionize” digital commerce.

Meanwhile, the ongoing festival season has given a significant boost to the platform’s operations. Transaction volumes on the Network reached 4.7 million in November, compared to just 1,200 in January this year. ONDC is witnessing orders from over 250 cities across the country.

“Right now, we are doing about 200,000 transactions a day, which spans across various categories. Of these, mobility has the majority share of around 60 per cent. The remaining 40 per cent is coming from other segments like food delivery, fashion, electronics, and logistics, among others,” Vibhor Jain, Chief Operating Officer and President – Network Governance, ONDC, told Business Standard.

Food delivery is the second largest category on the Network, followed by fashion, which, Jain says, is “growing at a rapid pace” due to companies like Snapdeal joining ONDC.

“In the next five years, if ONDC can become a channel where around 50 per cent of the digital transactions in the country take place through the Network, that will be a success for us,” Jain added.

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First Published: Dec 04 2023 | 6:16 PM IST

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