Google in talks to sign up for India’s open up e-commerce community ONDC

A person walks previous the indication “Google for India” at the firm’s yearly technologies occasion in New Delhi, India, September 19, 2019. REUTERS/Sankalp Phartiyal/File Photograph

NEW DELHI, May perhaps 27 (Reuters) – Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google is in talks with the Indian federal government to combine its shopping companies with the country’s open up e-commerce network ONDC, two sources familiar with the make a difference told Reuters.

India tender-introduced its Open Community for Digital Commerce (ONDC) late past month as the government tries to finish the dominance of U.S. corporations Amazon.com (AMZN.O) and Walmart (WMT.N) in the quickly-escalating e-commerce sector. go through far more

The government estimates the Indian e-commerce market place was worthy of extra than $55 billion in gross items benefit in 2021 and will mature to $350 billion by the close of this 10 years.

ONDC Chief Government T. Koshy instructed Reuters that Google was one particular of many companies it was in discussions with to be connected with the job.

Google’s talks observe the success of its payments business enterprise due to the fact of the government’s initiative for economic transactions, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), claimed a person of the resources, equally of whom declined to be determined as they were being not authorised to examine the subject with the media.

Google’s present procuring enterprise is effective entirely as an aggregator of listings online and would not carry out any order fulfilment like shipping and delivery, which the likes of Amazon do.

A Google spokesperson declined to remark on regardless of whether it was in talks with the government.

“We remain fully commited to target on the enablement of little and medium organizations to leverage digital for deeper discovery and payments capabilities with Google Spend,” the spokesperson mentioned, referring to its payments services.

Companions of the ONDC job, which at present involves the likes of Indian fintech company Paytm (PAYT.NS), will display listings from every single other on their platforms in search success. The government’s purpose is to degree the taking part in area by minimizing the price of performing company for any vendor who wishes to list their merchandise on-line.

Some market executives, having said that, have raised problems around how listings from diverse sellers will be prioritised.

“The logic would be that the highest sellers/greatest rated sellers will probably get exhibited 1st, which means it will not be a amount-actively playing industry,” said Mahesh Narayanan, a former head of Google’s cellular ads business in India.

The ONDC programme aims to be a part of 30 million sellers and 10 million merchants on the web, and protect at the very least 100 towns and towns by August.

Caesar Sengupta, the chief government of economical technologies startup Arbo Operates who played a vital position in developing Google Pay out in India, reported he sees major potential with ONDC.

“A single issue ONDC will surely need to have is a buyer player to travel adoption with the masses,” he explained. “You may well recall that UPI experienced only 17 million transactions per month right before Google Fork out released and the graph thereafter is a hockey adhere.”

Reporting by Munsif Vengattil and Krishna N. Das in New Delhi and Paresh Dave in Oakland, California Modifying by Shri Navaratnam and Kim Coghill

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