In 2021, the Indian government launched the Open Network for Digital Commerce with a promise that sounded almost inevitable: do for e-commerce what UPI did for payments. Break Amazon and Flipkart's dominance the same way UPI broke the grip of expensive card networks. Give small sellers direct, low-cost access to buyers, the same way any shopkeeper can now accept a payment with a QR code.
Five years on, ONDC has real scale on the metrics that actually describe retail commerce — more than 300,000 sellers onboarded, active in 400+ cities, with 100+ buyer apps connected to the network, and grocery and food consistently the highest-volume categories. Worth being precise here, since ONDC's own headline number is easy to misread: the network has also reported crossing 350-500 million cumulative "transactions," but a substantial share of that figure is no longer retail commerce at all — ONDC has expanded into metro and bus ticketing (over 370,000 public transport trips a day, across nine metro systems) and its own ride-hailing vertical (over a million drivers), both counted in the same cumulative total. That's real infrastructure, but it's not the same thing as e-commerce scale, and conflating the two overstates how far ONDC has actually gotten on the specific problem this article is about. As one network participant put it plainly to the Economic Times, the honest question ONDC still hasn't answered is "why would you buy a product here rather than on Amazon or Flipkart? The price is the same everywhere." A lot of tier-2 and tier-3 shoppers who use ONDC daily, through apps like Paytm or PhonePe, don't even know that's what they're using.
We think this is worth studying carefully, not glossing over — because ONDC is trying to solve close to the same underlying problem STAASH exists to solve, and understanding exactly where it's struggled taught us something real about how to build this differently.
UPI solved a universal need. ONDC needs coordination.
Here's the structural difference that explains most of the gap. UPI worked because it solved something almost everyone already needed to do — move money, quickly, without friction — and about 50 banks, controlling roughly 90% of India's transaction volume, had to get on board for it to work. That's a large number, but a coordinated one: a small set of large, sophisticated institutions, all with an obvious reason to join.
ONDC's version of that same challenge is a different order of magnitude. It needs roughly 63 million small businesses — the ones that drive over 90% of Indian commerce — to independently adopt shared infrastructure, alongside logistics providers, and buyer-facing apps, all coordinating around the same open protocol. UPI needed alignment among institutions. ONDC needs alignment among millions of independent shopkeepers, sellers, and delivery networks who've never had a reason to coordinate with each other before.
There's a second, more fundamental difference underneath that one. UPI moves bits — a digital transaction, information, nothing physical. ONDC moves atoms — real inventory, real packages, real delivery routes, across sellers who don't share systems and buyers who expect Amazon-level consistency regardless of which of hundreds of independent sellers actually fulfils their order. Building a shared protocol for money is hard. Building a shared protocol for the messy, physical business of getting a package from a stranger's shop to someone's door, reliably, at scale, is a fundamentally harder problem.
The accountability gap
There's a specific, structural weak point in ONDC's model worth naming directly, because it's the one closest to what STAASH exists to fix. In ONDC's food delivery pilots, front-end apps largely functioned as customer acquisition tools — they brought the buyer in, then handed off. Actual customer service, order accuracy, and complaint resolution were left to individual restaurants and sellers to handle on their own, inconsistently, without a shared standard. A buyer who has a bad experience doesn't know who's actually responsible for fixing it — the app they opened, the seller who fulfilled it, or the logistics provider who delivered it. Nobody clearly owns the outcome.
One of our own founders lived a small version of exactly this. An order for sweets, placed through Paytm from an ONDC-listed shop — thirty minutes passed with no tracking, no status update, no way to tell whether anyone was actually handling it, until the order simply arrived. Nothing went wrong in the end. But there was no way to know that while it was happening, and no single place to ask.
That's not a minor detail. It's the same lesson we already wrote about when comparing STAASH to Good Glamm Group's collapse: an open, disconnected structure with no single party accountable for the experience tends to produce exactly this kind of gap, however good the underlying idea is.
Why this shaped how we built STAASH differently
ONDC is trying to solve this problem by building an open protocol that anyone — any buyer app, any seller, any logistics provider — can plug into, with no central curation and no single party responsible for the end-to-end experience. That's a genuinely important, ambitious public-infrastructure goal, and honestly, if it eventually reaches UPI-like momentum, it will have done something remarkable for millions of small businesses across every category, not just the one we operate in.
STAASH isn't attempting that same civilization-scale coordination problem, and we designed it not to need to. We're not asking millions of independent parties to adopt shared rails. We're a single, curated app, with a defined, vetted roster of homegrown brands — and a clear, deliberate split in who's responsible for what. The merchant owns the product and the resolution: quality, fulfillment, and the actual decision on whether a return or refund is warranted, the same way an Uber driver owns the quality of the ride. STAASH owns the channel and the money: every issue gets raised in one place, every payment and every refund — even one a merchant initiates — moves through STAASH's own rails, and STAASH Health makes each merchant's track record visible and comparable across the platform, the way a driver rating does.
That split matters specifically because of the gap we just described. A shopper on STAASH never has to wonder who's actually moving their money, even in the middle of a dispute about who's right. Here's the split stated plainly, not left to inference:
| Merchant's responsibility | STAASH's responsibility |
|---|---|
| Product quality & fulfillment | Payment collection & checkout |
| Approving or denying a return | Processing the refund, once approved |
| Shipping and delivery | One support channel for the customer |
| Visible SLA & track record (STAASH Health) |
The merchant decides the outcome; STAASH always processes it, and always owns the single place a customer goes to raise a concern in the first place.
Notice that a table like this can't really be drawn for ONDC — not because nobody's tried, but because it's an open network, not a company. A dozen different buyer apps, seller apps, and logistics providers can each set their own answer to "whose job is this," and there's no requirement that any two of them agree. That's the actual tradeoff of open infrastructure: enormous reach, and no single point of accountability, by design. STAASH's table above is only possible because we made the opposite choice — one company, one clear line, not an open network of independently-run parties each free to answer accountability differently.
The same logic extends to who's even allowed on the platform in the first place. STAASH doesn't onboard anyone who applies — we bring on sellers who are already in business, with a genuine track record, not first-time or unverified operators. And STAASH Health isn't just a badge a brand earns once and keeps forever: a seller whose rating consistently falls below a set threshold gets offboarded. Access to STAASH isn't a permanent right — it's tied to actually maintaining the standard, on an ongoing basis. An open network built for anyone to plug in has no equivalent lever. STAASH does, because curation was a design choice from the start, not an afterthought bolted on once something went wrong.
That's a narrower, more tractable version of the same underlying ambition ONDC has — give small, independent sellers a real alternative to fighting Amazon and Flipkart alone — without asking an entire economy's worth of independent parties to coordinate before the first shopper benefits.
We're not against ONDC. We might even end up using it.
Nothing here is a claim that ONDC has failed, or that its ambition is wrong. The government's own target — 25% of India's e-commerce transactions flowing through ONDC by 2030 — is a serious, multi-year public infrastructure goal, not a startup's quarterly milestone, and open protocols have historically taken longer to reach their inflection point than centralized products do. It's entirely possible ONDC becomes real infrastructure STAASH itself builds on someday, the way countless fintech products now sit on top of UPI without anyone thinking twice about it.
But that's a bet on future infrastructure. Homegrown brands need a working answer to fragmented discovery, checkout, and accountability today, not in 2030. That gap — between what open infrastructure might eventually deliver and what an accountable, curated app can deliver right now — is exactly where STAASH lives.
