Government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) has increased the monthly incentive payout for the network participant up to Rs 60 lakh, Moneycontrol reported. The move is aimed at surging demand and increased adoption ahead of the festive season.
Further, citing a source, Moneycontrol said that the overall strategy has been to bring down the incentives.
“Post the festive season, the incentives may decline to Rs 40 lakh,” the source said.
Citing an internal memo sent to network players, the Moneycontol report mentioned, “The monthly limit for the cumulative (across all programs) financial assistance requested by any network participant will be Rs 60,00,000 for October 2024. This limit will be applied including all programs and schemes run by ONDC for the month of October”.
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Notably, the incentive may have gone up on a month-on-month basis, compared to the August incentive payout. However, there is still a reduction of nearly 76 percent from Rs 2.5 crore.
Earlier, ONDC had announced that it was cutting its maximum payout per player to rs 2.5 crore from Rs 3 crore per month till September end. But, the platform has reduced it to Rs 60 lakh.
ONDC provides financial incentives to network players depending on order volumes and categories. The money is used to offer discounts and offers to customers to promote the adoption of the network.
Last month ONDC announced another change in the incentive payout rule under which it said that financial assistance will be provided only on orders placed between different Buyer network participants and Seller network participants.
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ONDC has also offered an incentive for logistics seller network participants such as Ola, MagicFleet, etc
However, logistics seller NPs who have crossed the scale of 3 lakh orders in any previous month will not qualify for financial assistance under this program.
Several new-age companies such as Paytm, Magicpin, Shiprocket, etc have taken to ONDC, aimed at breaking the dominance of Amazon, Flipkart, Zomato, and Swiggy.
The government hopes to increase e-commerce penetration in the country to 25 percent with ONDC.