NEW DELHI -Alphabet Inc’s Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) is in talks with the Indian government to connect its shopping services to the country’s open e-commerce network ONDC, two sources told Reuters.
India soft-launched its Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) at the end of last month. The government is trying to stop Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Walmart (NYSE:WMT) from controlling the fast-growing e-commerce market.
The government thinks that http://www.investindia.gov.in/sector/retail-e-commerce/e-commerce The gross merchandise value of the Indian e-commerce market was more than $55 billion in 2021, and it will grow to $350 billion by the end of this decade.
ONDC CEO T. Koshy told Reuters that talks were going on with many companies, including Google, about joining the project.
The Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a government program for financial transactions, has helped Google’s payments business do well, said one of the sources, who did not want to be identified because they were not allowed to talk to the media about the matter.
Google’s current shopping business is just a list of online listings. It doesn’t do any order fulfillment, like delivering items, like Amazon does.
A Google representative wouldn’t say if the company was in talks with the government.
The company’s payments service’s spokesperson said, “We’re still committed to helping small and medium-sized businesses use digital for better discovery and payments with Google Pay.”
Partners in the ONDC project, such as the Indian fintech company Paytm, will show listings from each other in search results on their own platforms. The goal of the government is to level the playing field by making it cheaper for any online seller who wants to list their goods to do business.
Some business leaders, on the other hand, are worried about how listings from different sellers will be ranked.
Mahesh Narayanan, a former head of Google’s mobile ads business in India, said, “The logic would be that the best-selling or highest-rated sellers will probably be shown first, which means it won’t be a level playing field.”
By August, at least 100 cities and towns will be covered by the ONDC program, which aims to connect 30 million sellers and 10 million merchants online.
Caesar Sengupta, who is the CEO of the financial technology company Arbo Works and helped set up Google Pay in India, said that he thinks ONDC has a lot of potential.
“ONDC will definitely need a consumer player to get more people to use it,” he said. “You may remember that UPI had only 17 million transactions per month before Google Pay, and the graph after that looks like a hockey stick.”
