ONDC Has Carried 500 Million Transactions Since a Handful of Coriander Was Delivered in Bengaluru in April 2022, and Any Compliant Buyer App Can Find Any Seller

ONDC, the Open Network for Digital Commerce, lists 500 million cumulative transactions as of 25 July 2026 in the milestone timeline on its own website. The first order on the network was placed on 29 April 2022: a handful of dhaniya (coriander leaves), delivered in Bengaluru.

No shopping app sits at the centre of ONDC. In a written Lok Sabha reply on 22 July 2025, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry described it as an open protocol on which platforms and marketplaces can be built. A protocol is a shared set of technical rules that different software agrees to follow. A seller who signs up through any compliant seller app becomes visible to every compliant buyer app, so a customer on one app can order from a shop that joined through another.

What the network is, in the government’s own words

The Press Information Bureau (PIB), the government’s release service, published that reply, given by the Minister of State for Commerce and Industry, Jitin Prasada. The reply calls ONDC a Section 8 company, meaning a non-profit company, and an initiative of the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT). Three features are listed: interoperability, so a seller on any platform can be found by buyers on any other; unbundling, so separate companies can specialise in one link of the chain; and competition among apps, which the reply says keeps transaction fees low.

A PIB explainer of 4 January 2025 names the roles on the network: buyer apps, seller apps, logistics providers and technology enablers. They exchange requests through standardised APIs, which are agreed formats for software to talk to software. According to the same explainer, ONDC does not own or operate the shops. Per PIB’s April 2022 note, the protocols fix how cataloguing, inventory, order handling and delivery are recorded, so a small business can use any compatible app rather than the rules of one platform.

Set up in 2021 by DPIIT, with the Quality Council of India and Protean

On 13 August 2021 the Commerce Minister chaired a meeting of an ONDC advisory council that, PIB lists, included Nandan Nilekani, Adil Zainulbhai (chairman of the Quality Council of India, QCI), and Dilip Asbe, then chief executive of the National Payments Corporation of India.

ONDC’s timeline says the company was registered as a Section 8 company in December 2021. PIB’s 2025 explainer says it was incubated at QCI, which was joined by Protean as co-founder, with an authorised capital of 500 crore rupees and equity from public and private banks and financial institutions. ONDC’s page counts 33 banks, exchanges, depositories and enterprises as investors. ThePrint reported 30 financial institutions in June 2025, among them SBI, NABARD, Axis Bank, Bajaj Finserv and HDFC Bank, and said no single company holds a major shareholding.

From coriander in Bengaluru to seven apps in two months

On 29 April 2022 the pilot started in five cities: Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Bhopal, Shillong and Coimbatore. Inc42 reported a plan to add 150 retailers across the five, and DPIIT Additional Secretary Anil Agrawal said the point was to learn how the network works under real conditions. Grocery and food and beverages were the two categories.

By 23 June 2022, PIB reported, seven companies (one buyer app, five seller apps and one logistics app) had built ONDC-compatible apps and completed cascaded transactions across the network in all five cities. That meant a buyer app, a seller app and a delivery app, each from a different company, handled a single order. At that meeting the Commerce Minister asked DPIIT to run a pilot aimed at traders who were not yet online, drawn from one market.

On 30 August 2022 PIB said ONDC expected more than 30 participants in the coming weeks and planned to begin testing with public users in limited areas. ONDC’s timeline records food and beverages launching in Bengaluru in September 2022. Its list shows 1 million transactions in May 2023 and 10 million in August 2023.

The order and seller figures, each with its date

ONDC’s own timeline gives the cumulative path: 100 million in August 2024, 250 million in June 2025 and 500 million on 25 July 2026.

DPIIT’s 2025 year-end review, released through PIB on 10 December 2025, says ONDC had processed 326 million or more orders as of October 2025, including 18.2 million in October 2025, with average daily transactions of about 5.9 lakh (590,000). ThePrint gave 16.1 million orders for April 2025. Cross-Border Magazine, citing DPIIT figures, reported 218 million transactions in the financial year 2025-26, against about 2 lakh in 2022-23.

By June 2026, says the PIB factsheet of 12 August 2026, ONDC had over 20 crore buyers (200 million), 5 lakh sellers, presence in 1,000 cities and nearly 90 lakh (9 million) monthly transactions. That monthly figure is lower than the 18.2 million orders PIB reported for October 2025. Neither document says what it counts, and tuput could not reconcile the two.

Seller counts also depend on definition. PIB’s March 2026 backgrounder says 1.16 lakh or more retail sellers were live from over 630 cities and towns as of December 2025. Business Standard, citing an Economic Times report, gave 764,000 sellers and service providers across 616 cities in March 2025. None of the sources gives a count on one basis over time.

What the network carries: rides, groceries, metro tickets and farm goods

PIB’s 2025 explainer lists 13 domains: food and beverage, grocery, fashion and footwear, home and kitchen, electronics, beauty and personal care, health and wellness, gift cards, mobility, financial services, services, agriculture, and education and training. Food and grocery came first.

Rides now make up much of the volume. ThePrint reported that mobility orders rose from 3.6 million in April 2024 to 9.4 million in April 2025, 58 per cent of the month’s total, with driver-direct apps such as Namma Yatri and Yatri Sathi behind much of it. Business Standard reported 8.1 million mobility transactions in February 2025, up 47 per cent from 5.5 million in October 2024, and 2 million logistics orders in February 2025 against 35,000 in April 2024, when that segment launched.

Public transport is on the network too. ONDC’s timeline records Chennai Metro joining in February 2024 and Delhi Metro going live in May 2025. Cross-Border Magazine, citing government figures, reported more than 370,000 public transport journeys a day through over 35 buyer apps in June 2026, across nine metro systems and four city bus operators.

For small sellers, the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises runs the TEAM scheme, which pays part of the cost of getting micro and small firms onto ONDC, with half the beneficiaries to be women-owned. PIB’s July 2025 reply adds that eSaras, a rural livelihoods platform, listed more than 800 self-help group handicraft products on ONDC, and that a WhatsApp helper bot for sellers and buyers runs in five languages.

The comparison with UPI

Officials drew the comparison themselves. PIB’s 13 August 2021 release said: “As UPI is to the digital payment domain, ONDC is to e-commerce in India.” The April 2022 note put ONDC’s open protocols alongside those behind web pages, email and UPI.

The scales are far apart. NPCI data reported by Business Today puts UPI at 24.07 billion payments in September 2026, up 23 per cent on a year earlier, against nearly 9 million monthly ONDC transactions in June 2026 per PIB. Payments and orders are different units, and the months differ. tuput’s articles on how UPI compares with the world’s payment systems and on how India built the world’s busiest payment rail cover the payments side.

Analysts took the comparison apart early. In July 2022 Jefferies, the equity research firm, argued that UPI only had to move data between banks and customers, while an ONDC order involves product quality, seller reliability and delivery speed, and mostly happens offline. Jefferies also said Amazon and Flipkart already serve most users well enough that ONDC’s offer would have to be strong to make them switch. ONDC’s then chief executive, T Koshy, called that one opinion and said sellers would handle disputes, with unresolved cases escalated to a third-party online dispute platform. Anup Pai, chief executive of eSamudaay, a firm that helps local businesses go digital, said: “This equivalency between UPI and ONDC is erroneous.” Shireesh Joshi, ONDC’s chief business officer, told Inc42: “We are not here to challenge Flipkart, Amazon.”

What surveys and later reports found

Retail orders on the network (food, grocery, fashion and similar) peaked at 6.5 million in October 2024, according to ThePrint and Business Standard, and fell to 4.6 million in February 2025 and 4.3 million in April 2025. Business Standard tied the fall to ONDC cutting its monthly cap on incentives from 3 crore rupees in July 2024 to about 30 lakh, which it said hit smaller buyer apps such as Magicpin, Paytm and Ola Consumer, and reported that ONDC planned a service fee of 1.5 rupees on seller-app orders above 250 rupees from April 2025. ThePrint said unnamed industry experts judged that ONDC had not yet made a sizeable impact on Indian e-commerce but had long-term potential.

LocalCircles, a survey firm, published a survey of more than 31,000 responses from 319 districts on 1 May 2025. The survey found 15 per cent of e-commerce users had ordered through ONDC in 2024-25, up from 12 per cent a year earlier, and 62 per cent of those asked judged its prices better value, up from 31 per cent. Fifty-four per cent of respondents to the experience question found it cumbersome, up from 44 per cent.

What ONDC lists for 2026

ONDC’s timeline records 13,000 or more retailers joining its DigiDukaan programme for neighbourhood shops in Hyderabad and Jaipur in March 2026, and a single booking for all three Mumbai Metro lines in April 2026. For June 2026 it lists more than 50 logistics partners live, over 30 of them small fleet operators, and 29 asset management companies live in financial services.