Should Your Shopify Brand Be Selling on ONDC in 2026
Every few months a founder asks us whether they should be on ONDC. The pitch is compelling: an open network where commissions are a fraction of what marketplaces charge, backed by the government, already at serious scale. The honest answer for most Shopify brands in 2026 is more nuanced than either the enthusiasts or the sceptics will tell you, and it depends almost entirely on what you sell.
What ONDC actually is
The first thing to understand is that ONDC is not a website you list on. ONDC describes itself as an open network protocol rather than a platform, and states plainly that it "is not a central mediator or intermediary."
It is a set of rules that lets buyer applications and seller applications talk to each other. A shopper uses a buyer app. Your products reach that app through a Seller Network Participant, which ONDC describes as connecting merchants to the ecosystem by "digitizing the seller's catalogue and dispersing payments."
So you do not integrate with ONDC. You join through a seller app that has already integrated, in much the same way that you do not integrate with the card networks, you use a payment provider.
The scale is real
ONDC's own figures, published as of May 2025, put the network at 616 or more cities, 26 domains spanning food, grocery, fashion, electronics and financial services, 306 network participants, over 7.64 lakh sellers and service providers, and more than 16 million cumulative orders across 13 languages.
Those numbers are dated and the network has kept moving, so treat them as a floor rather than a current reading. The point is that this is not a pilot. It is infrastructure with real volume flowing through it.
The commission argument, handled honestly
The headline reason brands look at ONDC is take rate. Marketplaces in India commonly charge somewhere in the mid to high teens and upward once you include commission, fulfilment and advertising, and ONDC is widely reported to operate at a small fraction of that.
We are not going to quote you a specific ceiling, because the fees you actually pay depend on which seller app you join through and what they charge on top of the network, and that is not published in one place. What is structurally true is that the network itself is not designed to extract a marketplace-sized margin, so the ceiling is lower. Whether your particular arrangement realises that saving is a question for the seller app you are evaluating.
Ask any seller app three things before signing: what they charge, what the buyer app charges, and who is responsible when a delivery goes wrong.
Where ONDC genuinely works today
Maturity is very uneven across categories, and this is the part that decides your answer.
Food and grocery are the most developed domains by a wide margin, which is unsurprising given where the volume started. If you sell packaged food, beverages, staples or everyday consumables, the buyer-side demand exists and the logistics around it are well trodden.
Fashion, electronics and general merchandise are live but thinner. You can be there, and some brands are doing real numbers, but you are earlier in the curve and should expect to work harder for discovery.
If you sell a considered, higher value or heavily branded product where the purchase decision depends on presentation and trust, ONDC is probably not where your next rupee of revenue comes from this year.
What it means for your Shopify store
Practically, joining ONDC means your catalogue has to exist accurately in another system, and that raises the same questions as any additional channel.
Your product data has to be clean enough to be understood without your theme around it. Titles, categories, pack sizes, weights and attributes carry the entire product when there is no brand page. Most catalogues we look at are not ready for this, and fixing it helps your own store's search visibility anyway.
Inventory has to be shared sensibly. If you are also on quick commerce or marketplaces, you now have several channels drawing on one physical pool, which is the point at which inventory drift stops being an inconvenience.
And your GST treatment needs to be right for a new channel with its own invoicing flow, which is a conversation for your CA rather than your agency. Our notes on GST setup on Shopify cover the store side.
What joining actually involves
The sequence is shorter than people expect, which is part of why the decision is low risk.
You choose a seller app and complete their onboarding, which is a commercial and compliance process rather than a technical one. Your catalogue is digitised into their system, either by upload or by connecting to your existing store or order management system. You agree who handles fulfilment, since some seller apps arrange logistics through the network and others expect you to ship. Then you go live and find out whether buyer-side demand exists for your category.
The part brands underestimate is the catalogue step. A product that reads fine on your own website often travels badly, because the theme was doing half the work. If your titles rely on the collection page for context, or your pack size lives in an image rather than a field, that information simply does not arrive.
This is the same weakness that shows up when an AI assistant reads your catalogue, and it is worth fixing once for every channel rather than per channel.
The risk worth naming
Channel sprawl is a real cost and it is rarely counted. Every additional channel adds a place your inventory can be wrong, a set of orders somebody has to reconcile, a support queue, and another number in the monthly revenue conversation.
A brand doing solid numbers on its own store and one marketplace, adding quick commerce and ONDC in the same quarter, will usually find that the operational overhead arrives immediately and the revenue arrives slowly. That is not an argument against either. It is an argument for adding one at a time and getting the plumbing right before the next one.
Our honest recommendation
If you sell food, grocery or everyday consumables, evaluate it properly now. The domain is mature, the economics are genuinely better than a marketplace, and the cost of trying is a seller app arrangement rather than a development project.
If you sell anything else, put it on the watch list rather than the roadmap. Spend the same effort on your product data, which pays off on your own store immediately and makes you ready for ONDC, quick commerce or an AI assistant reading your catalogue, all at once.
What we would not do is build a custom ONDC integration in 2026. Join through a seller app, find out whether the demand is there for your category, and only consider building when the volume justifies it.
How does a Shopify store connect to ONDC?
Through a Seller Network Participant, which is a seller application that has already integrated with the network. You do not connect to ONDC directly. Your catalogue is digitised by that seller app, which also handles payment dispersal, so your practical decision is which seller app to work with rather than how to build an integration.
Is ONDC cheaper than Amazon or Flipkart?
Structurally the network is not built to take a marketplace-sized cut, so the ceiling is lower. What you actually pay depends on the seller app and buyer app in your particular arrangement, and those fees are not published in a single place. Get all of them in writing before comparing against your current marketplace take rate.
Do I need a developer to join ONDC?
Usually not. Joining through a seller app is an onboarding process rather than a build. You may want development help getting your catalogue data clean enough to travel well, but that work is worth doing regardless of ONDC.
Which categories work best on ONDC?
Food and grocery are the most developed. Fashion, electronics and general merchandise are live but earlier, so expect to work harder for discovery. Considered, high value or presentation-dependent products are the weakest fit today.
Should I leave marketplaces if I join ONDC?
No. Treat it as an additional channel and let the numbers decide over a couple of quarters. Marketplaces bring demand that ONDC does not yet match in most categories, and the reason to be on ONDC is better economics on the orders it does bring, not replacing your existing volume.
Work out whether ONDC fits your brand
Free assessment. Email hello@exactwhy.com with subject "ONDC" and tell us your category, your catalogue size and which channels you are on today. We respond within 4 hours with a straight answer on whether your category is mature enough to bother yet. For a lot of brands it is not, and we will say so.
Paid catalogue and channel work, Rs 40,000 to Rs 1.5 lakh. Cleaning product data so it travels to any channel, setting up multi-channel inventory properly, and reconciliation across your store and your other channels.
Ongoing Shopify development, Rs 20,000 to Rs 50,000 a month. For brands adding channels faster than anyone is maintaining the plumbing.
The brands that get multi-channel right are not the ones on the most channels. They are the ones whose product data and inventory were in order before they added the second one.