An open network changes who owns the buyer relationship. That is a genuinely different proposition from another marketplace — and it is also more work than the pitch admits.
Most "should we be on X" questions are about reach. This one is about structure, which is why it is worth ten minutes even if the answer for you is no.
On a conventional marketplace, one operator owns three things at once: how buyers discover products, the relationship with the buyer, and the commission rate. Because those are bundled, the operator can change the rate, reorder the listings, or begin competing with you directly, and you have no alternative route to the same buyers.
An open network separates those roles. A seller-side application lists you. A buyer-side application is where the retailer actually shops. A shared protocol connects them. Neither side owns the buyer outright, and a distributor can in principle be reachable through many buyer apps without joining each one separately.
That is the genuine difference, and it is the reason the commission structures reported on the open network sit well below the rates dominant closed platforms typically charge. Lower take rates are a consequence of the structure, not a promotional offer.
The retail side of ONDC is the better-known part. The development that matters for distribution is the extension into B2B wholesale — manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors transacting with kirana retailers over the network, rather than only through a field force.
Reported coverage runs to several hundred cities and towns with a large number of sellers onboarded. Take those as reported figures rather than as a guarantee about your territory; network-wide totals say very little about whether the forty outlets on one beat are using a buyer app.
Vendors describing an open network tend to skip the part where being listed does not create demand.
Listing is not distribution. If retailers in your territory are not already sourcing through buyer-side apps, a perfect listing produces nothing. You will have done catalogue work, price maintenance and fulfilment integration for zero orders.
Catalogue upkeep is real work. Every SKU needs accurate description, pack size, tax treatment and price, kept current. A stale catalogue with your name on it is worse than no catalogue, because retailers who order against a wrong price become a service problem.
Fulfilment still has to happen. An order arriving over a protocol is still an order someone must pick, invoice, deliver and collect against. If that pipeline is manual today, adding a new intake channel adds load rather than efficiency. This is exactly the sequencing argument in evaluating an AI vendor pitch: capture and process reliably first, add channels second.
Price visibility cuts both ways. A network makes your prices comparable in a way a field force never did. For a distributor competing on service and range rather than price, that is not automatically good, and it deserves thought before listing rather than after.
Your existing buyers may already be there. The strongest signal is not a national statistic but whether retailers on your own beat are using buyer-side apps. That is answerable by asking twenty of them, and it costs nothing.
It is a hedge against platform concentration. If a meaningful share of your volume ever routes through one closed platform, that platform sets your terms. Having a live listing on an open network is cheap insurance against that, even at low volume.
The catalogue work is not wasted. A clean, structured product catalogue with correct pack sizes, HSN codes and GST rates is useful regardless. Most distributors do not have one, and building it for a listing gives you an asset that also feeds ordering, ERP export and pricing.
Four questions, in order. Stop at the first no.
Are retailers in your territory sourcing on buyer-side apps today? Ask twenty outlets on your own beat. If the answer is no, stop here and revisit in two quarters. Nothing below matters yet.
Is your catalogue clean enough to publish? Correct pack sizes, current prices, right tax treatment. If not, that is the actual first project, and it pays off whether or not you ever list — the unit mismatch problem alone is common enough to warrant the Wholesale Unit Converter.
Can you fulfil an order that arrives without a salesman attached? Intake, pick, invoice, deliver, collect. If any step assumes a human who took the order in person, fix that before adding the channel.
Do the economics work at your margin? Run the seller-app commission, plus fulfilment cost for a delivery you did not plan a route around, against your actual margin per order. A low commission on an order that costs more to deliver than it earns is still a loss.
For most distributors right now, the sober position is that this is worth understanding and probably not worth rushing.
The structural argument is sound and the direction is real. But networks succeed on the buyer side first, and a distributor's leverage comes from being ready when retailer-side demand arrives — with a clean catalogue and a fulfilment process that does not depend on a salesman having taken the order — rather than from being early to a listing nobody is browsing yet.
That readiness is the same readiness that makes everything else work. It is worth building for its own sake, and the network question then answers itself.
The questions that come up when a distributor first looks at ONDC seriously.
ONDC is an open network protocol rather than a marketplace operator. On a conventional platform one company owns discovery, the buyer relationship and the commission. On an open network those are separate roles played by different participants — a seller-side app lists you, a buyer-side app carries the retailer, and a shared protocol connects them — so no single operator owns the buyer or unilaterally sets the take rate.
The B2B layer is designed for exactly that: manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors transacting with retailers over the network rather than only through their own field force. Reported coverage extends across several hundred cities and towns with a large number of sellers onboarded, so the infrastructure is real, but whether it reaches the specific outlets on your beat is a question only your own territory can answer.
Reported commission structures on the open network are substantially lower than the rates typically charged by dominant closed platforms, which is the main commercial argument made for it. Treat those as reported ranges rather than a quote — the figure that matters is what the specific seller-side app you would join actually charges you, plus whatever the buyer-side app charges the retailer, since both sit between you and the order.
That listing on a network does not create demand by itself. If retailers in your territory are not already using buyer-side apps to source, being listed produces no orders while still costing you catalogue work, price maintenance and fulfilment integration. The cost of waiting is low and the cost of a badly-run listing is a stale catalogue with your name on it, so waiting until you can see retailer-side demand is usually the sound call.
The FlowKartAI team builds WhatsApp-native ordering for Indian B2B distributors and the kirana stores they serve. We write about distribution economics, GST compliance, and the practical side of putting AI in front of retailers who have never opened an app.
FlowKartAI parses natural language WhatsApp messages into ERP-ready orders in seconds.
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