Making its much-awaited entry into online commerce, digital payments company PhonePe has launched a dedicated hyperlocal consumer app linked to the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) protocol.
Tagged as ‘India’s Infinity store’, PhonePe is launching the app in its homeground Bengaluru with six categories to begin with–fashion, home decor, electronics, pharmacy, food, and grocery–giving the government-backed ONDC the big stage it had been seeking in its quest to democratise ecommerce.
With 440 million registered users and as many as 35 million offline merchants on PhonePe, the integration with ONDC fuels the Walmart-owned company’s ambitious plan to enter the online commerce segment, especially since its separation from ecommerce giant Flipkart in December.
“We need(ed) a whole new shopping app, and hence we announced our new hyperlocal consumer app, Pincode,” PhonePe CEO Sameer Nigam said at the launch event in Bengaluru on Tuesday.
While the company did not divulge the investment into or the budget set aside for the project, PhonePe executives said it is targeting over 100,000 orders on the new app by December.
For context, across multiple buyer apps, including Paytm, ONDC receives only a few hundred daily orders on average. The protocol officially launched in Bengaluru in September.
“ONDC is the next big thing. We are going to democratise ecommerce and not have it restricted to a few players,” former Infosys Chairman Nandan Nilekani, one of the key architects behind ONDC, said at the launch event.
“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,” he said.
On the Pincode app, users can “multitask” and have multiple carts with separate checkouts while shopping across different categories.
“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.
