| | MAY 20229Amazon, Flipkart & RILmay join ONDC FLIPKART'S LOGISTICS ARM EKART AND RELIANCE RETAIL-BACKED DUNZO HAVE ALREADY INTEGRATED WITH ONDC FOR LOGISTICS SERVICESed", another person aware of the integrations said.Thampy said the network aims to scale its pres-ence in about 100 cities by August and it will also be opened to the wider public in five cities -- Bengalu-ru, New Delhi, Coimbatore, Bhopal and Shillong -- where the pilot is underway. The network is currently in the `beta testing' phase with just five sellers onboard and a limited set of buyers from five cities."By the first week of June, we want to make it available to the broader public in these five cities. By Au-gust, we want to be there in 75-100 cities and by the end of the year, we should be there across the country", he said, explaining the roadmap for the network.The network aims to on-board small sellers and some expect it to have the impact on e-Commerce similar to what the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) had on digital payments. It is a `decentralized' platform without the need for customers and sellers to be on one platform."The open protocol enables discov-ery, ordering, execution, fulfilment, and post-fulfilment without mandat-ing the provider and consumer to come to the same platform", says a strate-gy paper issued by ONDC, which has been re-viewed.ONDC CEO was in Bengaluru earlier this week to talk to various stakehold-ers at an event organised by Synergia Foundation. ONDC is also educating key stakeholders, including online merchants, that visibility on the network won't be influenced by cer-tain algorithms by ecommerce plat-forms -- a growing concern among online sellers. E-Commerce firms maintain their algorithms do not treat sellers in a discriminatory manner while favouring others.
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