Wednesday 5 April 2023, Bangalore, India
PhonePe has made its entry into the ecommerce market by launching a hyperlocal consumer app linked to the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) protocol. This app is called India’s Infinity Store.
The company is launching this app in Bengaluru which will start with six major categories like fashion, home decore, electronics, pharmacy, food and grocery. By launching it with ONDC, PhonePe is giving ONDC the platform to fulfil its purpose to democratise the ecommerce market. ONDC is a body which has government backing.
PhonePe has 440 million registered users and as many as 35 million offline merchants. After its separation from the ecommerce giant Flipkart, it just wanted an opportunity to enter into the ecommerce market and its integration with ONDC is fulfilling its dreams.
PhonePe CEO Sameer Nigam said at the launch on Tuesday “We need(ed) a whole new shopping app, and hence we announced our new hyperlocal consumer app, Pincode”.
The company has still not revealed the budget they have decided for this project or if they have raised any investment, but expressed their expectation that they will receive 100,000 orders by the month of December.
As of now ONDC receives only hundreds of orders on average as compared to the other big ecommerce players, including Paytm, since its launch in the month of September 2022.
The former Chairman of Infosys Nandan Nilekani who is also one of the key architects behind ONDC, said at the launch “ONDC is the next big thing. We are going to democratise ecommerce and not have it restricted to a few players” and he further added “It needs some market person to put their weight behind the technology; someone has to take the ball and run… A company like PhonePe is now putting its weight behind ONDC and rolling out something exciting”.
“We would not be touching the prices. All the sellers will be listed democratically, and they would come via seller platforms. We are not here to decide who the winner is, and just want people to have way more choices,” CEO Sameer Nigam said.
This app will let users to multitask as in they can have multiple carts with different checkout options while shopping on the app in different categories.
