Why ONDC's Real Seller Number Is Way Smaller Than You Think

2026-07-11 — marketing strategy SME India

I was scrolling through the Ministry of Commerce numbers from December and stopped at one figure. 1.16 lakh retail sellers live on ONDC across 630 cities.

The headline buried the thing that actually matters.

About 85% of those sellers aren't transacting in any real sense. Not slow. Not waiting. Not selling. The gap between "onboarded" and "active" is where most people misunderstand ONDC entirely.

I'm not saying the network is fake. I'm saying the number is misleading, and if you're trying to decide whether ONDC is worth your time as an SME, you need to separate what the government is announcing from what's actually happening.

The December data showed Flipkart's Ekart joining as a logistics partner, PhonePe's Pincode expanding, Paytm integrating their payments layer into discovery. From a thousand feet up, it looks like ONDC finally has the muscle to compete. From ground level—where you're actually trying to sell—it looks different.

The real difference between renting and owning

On Amazon or Flipkart, your visibility is entirely controlled by their algorithm, your advertising spend, and whatever seller tier they've assigned you. Commission rates are something like 18% to 40% depending on your category. You're renting shelf space in their store, and they get to raise the rent whenever they want.

ONDC works differently. Your product gets listed on an open network. Any participating buyer app—Pincode, Paytm, whoever comes next—can surface it. Commissions are lower, more or less 3% to 10%. You're not paying someone else's rent.

Actually, that's not quite right. You're still paying, just not as much. But the structure is fundamentally different.

The catch is operational. On Flipkart, you can get away with slower catalog updates, inconsistent images, flexible delivery promises. The algorithm sorts you accordingly. On ONDC, your inventory has to be fresh in real-time because three different buyer apps are showing your product to different customers with different expectations. Your images, pricing, fulfillment times—they all have to hold up across multiple discovery channels you don't control.

That's why most sellers are inactive.

It's not that ONDC rejected them. They joined, realized the operational bar was higher than they expected, and went back to their single-platform setup.

PhonePe's Pincode has been doing the real work here, especially in hyperlocal grocery. Paytm's payments-first discovery suits sellers already using them as a collection tool. Ekart fixing the logistics problem matters because last-mile delivery without being locked into one platform's fulfillment terms was one of the sharper friction points for smaller sellers. Now it's less of one.

But none of that solves the catalog problem. Or the inventory problem. Or the fact that you need systems in place to manage them.

Who's actually winning here

By October 2024, ONDC was processing roughly 14 million transactions a month. The Ministry would love you to believe that's growth. It is. But here's what matters more: that volume is concentrated. Most of it is coming from a small subset of sellers who treat ONDC like a real distribution channel, not a passive listing.

The sellers gaining traction are the ones doing the operational work. Clean product data. Near real-time inventory. Reliable fulfillment. These things sound boring. They are. They're also the moat between sellers who make money on ONDC and sellers who join, list a few items, and vanish.

This is where we get things wrong sometimes, actually. Most consultants—including us—talk about ONDC like the platform itself is the advantage. It's not. The advantage is structural: discovery that doesn't depend on paying someone's algorithm. But you have to actually show up operationally to see that advantage. Most people don't.

ONDC won't replace Amazon or Flipkart anytime soon. The seller count has grown past 3 lakh now, but if the activity gap holds even partially, the real reach is far narrower than the headline suggests. It might be worth it anyway, depending on your category and whether you can actually manage the operational side.

For an SME willing to do the work, ONDC offers something the big platforms can't: discoverability that doesn't require paying for visibility. That's worth building toward. Just don't confuse onboarding with selling.