T Koshy, the chief executive of ONDC, on how the platform will democratise and transform ecommerce, why the network won't scale on incentives alone, and the biggest challenge—getting the industry to adopt this new model
Q. Over the last fortnight, social media has been abuzz comparing the prices of food ordered on Swiggy and Zomato versus those routed through ONDC. In many cases ONDC was cheaper by 50 percent. Can the momentum on ONDC continue without such incentives?
The incentives announced by ONDC, and some of our participants and sellers are triggers to jumpstart the network. We don’t believe that the network will scale based on such incentives. But the important point to note is that, unlike the platform-centric model [like Amazon or Flipkart], ONDC’s network-centric model will provide freedom to each of the ecosystem partners to design and roll out their own incentives and offers. So, for example, a kirana store owner can say, I can deliver the items ordered because it is just next door. That way, he is able to optimise, lower his costs, drive efficiencies, and as a result, offer better discounts to his customers. It’s in his hands to decide that.