To diversify its offerings, the central government’s Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) is looking to foray into skill-based services such as appliances repair, teaching assistance, among others, as per an exclusive Moneycontrol report.
ONDC currently allows participants to use its platform to offer food, groceries and mobility services, the report further revealed.
With its foray into skill-based services, the network is eyeing participants that could come on board to offer such skill-based services, chief business officer Shireesh Joshi told Moneycontrol and added that Urban Company would be an appropriate candidate.
“There are a variety of sectors where people have reached out to us for categories currently not enabled on the network. One of them is skill-based services. We’ve had many requests, both from organisations as well as from many state governments. It will require certain specifications, in terms of building the protocol to enable it and then getting network participants to come on board,” he added.
There will be some gestation period before users actually see these services on the network, he said.
“What we’re doing is that we are developing the capability of the network to be able to enable these services and make sure that we are ready on all fronts. It is too soon to predict the timing because we are really in the early stages of these discussions right now,” he said.
Other requests revolve around requirements of industrial products, such as metal alloys and construction material. “We are examining all of them and depending on the pace of progress, one or more of these will also get enabled,” said Joshi.
ONDC’s weekly average orders have been crossing over 1 lakh transactions per day. The orders are growing as it adds more sellers and service providers to the network. This is compared to 75,000-plus transactions per day that the network was clocking at the start of July.
On a monthly basis, the network is enabling 3 million transactions a month, which were only 1 million in July-August.
ONDC has also branched out to international B2B exports with Proxtera, a Singapore-based buying application.