Did PhonePe give up too early on ONDC's grocery offering?
ONDC needs a different thinking, maybe?
Phone is exiting grocery and all other non-food categories on its hyperlocal app, Pincode.
PhonePe Payment Technology Services Private Limited (Pincode) has requested ONDC to remain subscribed only to food and unreserved ticket booking domains on the ONDC registry, taking a view to join the other domains after re-aligning their internal approach.
It wasn't really working out as many parts of the ONDC network still need to come together and that’s work in progress. PhonePe doesn't want to give a below-part consumer experience either [ET]
Playing the ONDC game
I have been spending time on ONDC and here is how I look at it:
ONDC is a curation game. You don’t have to get everything that ONDC offers and you think that just by putting up a nice UI, some magic will happen.
For example, just because there are mom-and-pop shops/small retail stores on ONDC network, it doesn’t mean that you should enable all of them. After all, the grocery delivery+packaging experience has to be equally good as what others like Zepto/Blinkit offer.
Fact: On PhonePe’s Pincode app, some stores will take even 3 days to deliver -now that’s anything but quick commerce.
The bigger opportunity in ONDC is to lay out the game clearly well - for e.g. if you really want to compete on <x> mins delivery (x <=10), then you are better off doing this outside ONDC by launching your own dark stores and control the entire end to end experience.
Flipkart is trying to do that by working with mom-and-pop stores and using those as ‘dark’ stores (these stores could be part of ONDC network as well, but vertical integration gives Flipkart much more control on the experience).
Instead, maybe a good idea is to play a different game (think on buyer-fee model), have a comfortable delivery timeline (30 mins?) and choose your players (i.e. your partner network) carefully (not every store fit into it).
What’s your take?