On the afternoon of May 27, Beijing time, it was reported that two people familiar with the matter said today that Google was negotiating with the Indian government to discuss the integration of its shopping service with India's "digital commerce open network" (ondc)** Last month, the Indian government launched ondc in an attempt to break the dominance of American companies Amazon and Wal Mart in India's fast-growing e-commerce market.
The Indian government estimates that the total commodity value (Gmv) of the Indian e-commerce market has exceeded US $55billion in 2021 and will increase to US $350billion by the end of this century.
T.koshy, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of ondc, confirmed to the media that Google is one of many companies that are discussing the project with Google.
One of the people familiar with the matter said that Google's negotiation was conducted after the success of its payment business. As the Indian government has made a unified plan for digital payment and launched the unified payment interface (UPI), Google's payment business has also achieved results, becoming one of the most popular mobile payment services in India.
Google's current shopping business only acts as an "online commodity aggregator" and does not perform any order fulfillment, such as delivery, while Amazon and other companies belong to the latter.
A Google spokesman declined to comment on whether it was negotiating with the Indian government. When talking about Google payment services, the spokesman said: "we will continue to work to enable small and medium-sized enterprises to use digital technology to achieve deeper mining and payment capabilities through Google pay."
Ondc is committed to providing local language applications for buyers and sellers, with special emphasis on empowering small businesses and rural consumers. Its goal is to attract 30million sellers and 10million merchants, covering at least 100 towns by August.