| | MAY 20228IN FOCUSAmazon, Flipkart & RILmay join ONDC E-Commerce majors including Flipkart, Reli-ance Retail and Amazon are in talks to join the country's ambitious Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), multiple people in the know said, even as the network's pilot program to on-board kiranas and small & medium businesses gets underway in Bengaluru and four other cities.Flipkart's logistics arm Ekart and Reliance Re-tail-backed Dunzo have already integrated with ONDC for logistics services, while PhonePe, which is also owned by Flipkart and Walmart, is joining the network and is in advanced stages of integration, these people said.Paytm is already a part of the network. "The bigger e-Commerce players have indicated to ONDC that they will support it. Be-sides tapping into new users, this will also enable platforms with sizable business-to-business verticals to tap into the seller side of ONDC network to supply goods", one of the people cited above said.Platforms like Paytm and PhonePe are likely to offer real estate to ONDC on their platforms through which us-ers can log into the network, the sources added. ONDC, which still is at a nascent stage, is being pitched as a solution to break the dom-inance of large e-Commerce firms like Walmart-owned Flip-kart, Amazon and others in India. Hence, any move by these platforms to join and in-tegrate with the open network assumes huge signif-icance."The existing platforms (large etailers) work with a captive set of users. With an open network, ONDC will enable all the buyers in the network to be discov-erable to all the sellers. Therefore, existing platforms (too) will have an incentive to be part of ONDC", Thampy Koshy, CEO of ONDC said. He declined to comment on specific names of large ecommerce and logistics firms joining the network.A PhonePe spokesperson confirmed that the com-pany will join the ONDC network on buyer and seller sides. "Just like UPI, we want to build on an open ecosys-tem like ONDC while leveraging our payment relationship with merchants as well as consumers. This will help our merchant part-ners grow their business. In terms of timelines, we are actively working with ONDC to launch as soon as possible", PhonePe said in a state-ment."We are closely engaging with the ONDC team to better understand the proposed model and evaluate the role Amazon can play to bet-ter serve Indian customers and sellers", an Amazon India spokes-person said. Emails sent to other companies mentioned above did not elicit a response till press time Wednesday. "Key logistics (providers) are already there. Now, they are waiting for orders and want to see how it is execut-PLATFORMS LIKE PAYTM AND PHONEPE ARE LIKELY TO OFFER REAL ESTATE TO ONDC ON THEIR PLATFORMS THROUGH WHICH USERS CAN LOG INTO THE NETWORK
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