ONDC: India open network for buying and selling

On a closed marketplace, the platform owns the customer, the seller list, the search rankings and the commission. ONDC's premise is the opposite: keep a shared open protocol for discovering products, placing orders and paying, and let separate companies compete to serve buyers on one side and sellers on the other. The Press Information Bureau's own description of the initiative states the intent plainly — interoperable protocols that break the dominance of large e-commerce platforms and lower the cost of customer acquisition and transaction processing for sellers.

• A not-for-profit company established under the aegis of DPIIT, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, incorporated in December 2021 and taken national from April 2022.
• A network, not a shop. You cannot “shop on ONDC” any more than you shop on UPI. You shop through an app that is connected to the network.
• Unbundled roles — buyer-side apps, seller-side apps, and logistics or gateway providers plug into the same protocol. A kirana listed through one seller-side participant becomes discoverable to buyers using entirely different apps.
• The network covers goods and services — retail, food delivery, mobility and more, as participants build for each category.

Because the network is open, the seller's visibility does not depend on one platform's algorithm, and the buyer's choice of app does not lock them to one seller pool. That unbundling, not any single commission number, is the economic claim — charges are set by the participant you onboard with, so compare offers rather than trusting any fixed percentage quoted on the internet.

1. Visit ondc.org, the network's official site, and look for the seller-onboarding section.
2. Choose a seller-side network participant — the company that will list your catalogue on the network. Treat this choice the way you would choose an accountant: compare onboarding fees, monthly charges, cataloguing help and logistics tie-ups.
3. Keep ready: GST registration, bank details, product photos and descriptions, and pickup address.
4. Your catalogue goes live on the network and can surface in any participating buyer app.
5. Orders, payments and delivery run through the participants' rails under the network's protocols.

The same openness means due diligence stays yours: read the participant's contract for who handles returns, chargebacks and dispute resolution, because ONDC sets the protocol while participants provide the service.

Kashvi Pathak, who ran a small pickle and papad unit from home, had been selling only to walk-in customers and one local WhatsApp group. Onboarding through a seller-side participant put her catalogue on the network, and within weeks orders began arriving from buyers using apps she had never heard of, in cities she had never sold to. Her costs stayed flat — one cataloguing fee, one logistics pickup partner — and her complaint when a shipment was lost went to her participant, in writing, the way any service contract works. The point of her story is structural: ten apps' worth of demand without ten separate onboarding efforts.

ONDC itself is a company, not a department — so for information about the network's governance, funding, performance or policy, the reliable public authority is DPIIT, which incubated and anchors the initiative. RTI applications about network statistics, government support to ONDC, or integration mandates go to DPIIT's Central Public Information Officer.

To:
The Central Public Information Officer,
Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade,
Ministry of Commerce and Industry, New Delhi

Sir/Madam, under section 6 of the RTI Act, 2005, kindly provide:

1. Total funds sanctioned and released by DPIIT towards the
   Open Network for Digital Commerce since inception, year-wise.
2. Documents stating the current membership/governance structure
   of ONDC as reported to the Department.
3. Network statistics reported to the Department: seller and
   buyer participant counts and transaction volumes, for the
   last financial year.
4. Any evaluations, reviews or studies of ONDC commissioned by
   the Department, and their findings.

Rs. 10 application fee paid to the Accounts Officer.

For a small business that feels a participant misbehaved, the RTI is not the remedy — the contract and consumer forums are. The RTI is for the machine behind the market: who funded it, how it is governed, and what it actually achieves.

No. ONDC is the network. Apps you download are participants connected to it. Any app claiming to be ONDC itself is misdescribing itself.

There is no single network-wide commission. Your seller-side participant sets its charges for onboarding, cataloguing and transactions — so compare participants before signing up, and treat blanket percentage claims online with caution.

The seller who supplied it, with escalation through the buyer app you used — the ordinary consumer-protection route under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 applies as with any online purchase.

Ask DPIIT, which holds the policy and funding record. A private company's internal papers are not automatically disclosable, but government-side records about it are.

• Digital India governance schemes
• Mudra loan for small business
• PM SVANidhi for street vendors
• Financial support schemes
• The RTI Playbook book — drafting and escalation from first application to second appeal.

Last reviewed: 26 August 2026.