ONDC and D2C Ecommerce India: Selling Direct Without Bleeding Marketplace Commissions

What is ONDC, and why should a small seller care?

ONDC, short for the Open Network for Digital Commerce, is a government-backed initiative from India that is trying to do for online shopping what UPI did for payments. UPI meant you no longer needed to be inside one company's app to send money; any app could talk to any other. ONDC is built on the same idea. It is not an app or a marketplace you sign up for. It is a set of open rules that let a buyer on one app discover and order from a seller on a completely different app.

For a small seller, that matters because today you are largely renting space on a handful of big marketplaces. You play by their rules, pay their fees, and if they change the algorithm or your account gets flagged, your sales can drop overnight. ONDC aims to unbundle that. Instead of one platform controlling discovery, logistics, and payments, those pieces become separate, interoperable services you can plug into.

The practical promise for an Indian SMB is reach without being trapped. A kirana store in Guwahati, a saree label in Surat, or a spice brand in Kochi can, in theory, get discovered by buyers across many apps while keeping more control and more margin. ONDC is still maturing, category depth and buyer volumes vary a lot, so treat it as one promising channel among several, not a magic replacement for everything you do today.

The bigger shift ONDC signals is this: the era where you had to hand your customer relationship to a marketplace to be online is ending. Combine ONDC with your own D2C setup and you get a real alternative.

Marketplace vs D2C: where does your money actually go?

Selling on a large marketplace feels easy because the traffic is already there. But that traffic is expensive, and the cost is hidden inside layers of fees. Before you decide where to invest, it helps to see the full stack of what a marketplace typically takes out of each sale.

• Category commission: a percentage of every order, which varies widely by product type and can run from low single digits to well over 20 percent.
• Closing or fixed fees: a flat charge per order that hurts most on low-value items.
• Shipping and fulfilment fees: weight-based charges, often higher if you are not on their warehousing programme.
• Advertising and sponsored listings: increasingly you must pay to be seen even for your own brand searches.
• Payment gateway and collection fees baked into the settlement.
• Returns and RTO (return to origin) costs, which the seller frequently absorbs.

Add these up and it is common for a seller to keep only a fraction of the sticker price. Worse, you often do not get the buyer's phone number, email, or full address in a usable form. You cannot easily message them again, run a loyalty offer, or bring them back. You made a sale but you did not gain a customer.

Direct-to-consumer, or D2C, flips this. When someone buys on your own website, app, or WhatsApp, you pay for payments and shipping, but there is no marketplace commission skimming the top and no forced ad spend just to appear. More importantly, the customer is yours: their contact details, their order history, their preferences. That data is the asset that lets you sell to them a second and third time at almost no cost.

The smart play is not to abandon marketplaces. It is to use them for what they are good at while steadily building D2C channels you actually own, so you are never dependent on a single platform's goodwill.

How do you build your own storefront: website, app, and WhatsApp?

Owning the customer means having places to sell that belong to you. For most Indian SMBs, three channels cover the vast majority of D2C sales, and you do not need all of them on day one.

The first is your own website. This is your home base: a clean, fast, mobile-first store where your full catalogue lives, where your brand is presented on your terms, and where SEO can bring in free traffic over time. A good store loads quickly on a patchy mobile connection, shows prices with GST clearly, and makes checkout painless with UPI and cards.

The second is a mobile app. Not every business needs one early, but for brands with repeat buyers, groceries, supplements, fashion, food, an app drives loyalty because it sits on the customer's home screen and supports push notifications you do not pay per message for. It becomes your lowest-cost channel to re-engage buyers.

The third, and often the fastest to convert in India, is WhatsApp commerce. Buyers are already comfortable there. A proper WhatsApp storefront lets a customer browse a catalogue, ask a question, place an order, and pay, all inside the chat, with a human or an automated assistant guiding them. For many local and regional brands, WhatsApp outperforms the website simply because it meets people where they already are.

The key is that these should not be three disconnected islands. Your website, app, and WhatsApp should share one catalogue, one inventory count, and one order list, so a sale on WhatsApp instantly updates stock everywhere. We will come back to how that single-system setup works later.

Can AI really cut the cost of product images, content, and SEO?

One reason sellers stay stuck on marketplaces is that building a good D2C store feels like a lot of work: shooting product photos, writing descriptions, filling in specifications, and optimising for search. This is exactly where AI has changed the maths for a small team.

For visuals, AI tools can now take a plain phone photo of your product and generate clean, studio-style images on white or lifestyle backgrounds, and even short product videos for reels and ads. A jewellery seller or an apparel brand that could never afford a professional shoot for every SKU can now produce consistent, attractive imagery at a tiny fraction of the old cost. Used well, this closes much of the visual gap between a small brand and a big one.

For text, AI can draft product titles, descriptions, and specification tables in clear language, and even in Hindi or regional languages for buyers who prefer them. It can write the category pages, FAQs, and blog content that search engines reward, which is how you earn free, compounding traffic instead of renting it through ads forever.

A word of caution: AI is a drafting tool, not an autopilot. Prices, GST details, sizing, ingredients, and any health or safety claims must be checked by a human before they go live. Wrong information in a product listing creates returns, refunds, and trust damage that costs far more than the time saved.

What about payments and delivery: how do the plumbing pieces fit?

A store only earns money if buyers can pay easily and receive their order reliably. In India, both of these are now well-solved with tools that plug into a modern storefront.

On payments, UPI is the default expectation for most buyers, and it is cheap and instant. A payment gateway such as Razorpay, or similar Indian providers, lets you accept UPI, cards, net banking, wallets, and EMI through one integration, with money settling into your bank account. For higher-value or B2B orders, offering cards and EMI can meaningfully lift conversion. Do check the per-transaction fees, since on thin-margin products even a small percentage matters.

On logistics, you do not need your own delivery fleet. Aggregators like Shiprocket, Delhivery, and others connect you to multiple courier partners through a single dashboard, so the system can pick the cheapest or fastest option for each pincode, print labels, and share tracking with the customer automatically. This is what lets a two-person brand ship pan-India as smoothly as a large company.

The detail that separates a smooth operation from a stressful one is integration. When payment, shipping, and your order list are wired together, an order flows from paid, to picked, to labelled, to shipped, to delivered with tracking updates going to the buyer, without anyone copying data between apps by hand. Cash on delivery, GST-compliant invoicing, and returns handling should all be part of this same flow.

Get this plumbing right once and it quietly runs in the background, freeing you to focus on products and customers instead of firefighting orders.

How do inventory, POS, and offline sales stay in sync?

Many Indian SMBs are not purely online. They have a shop, a counter, distributors, or a Tally-based back office, and they also sell across several online channels. The nightmare scenario is selling the same last piece twice, once in the shop and once online, because the two systems never talk.

The fix is a single source of truth for stock. Your point-of-sale (POS) at the counter, your website, your app, your WhatsApp store, and your marketplace listings should all read from and write to one inventory count. When a customer buys the last unit in the shop, the online listings should reduce to zero automatically within moments.

This same discipline extends to your accounts. Many businesses run their books in Tally, and orders from every channel should be able to flow into your accounting and GST filing without manual re-entry. Clean, automatic data here saves hours every week and prevents the mismatches that cause trouble at filing time.

A connected CRM ties it together on the customer side: every order, whether it came from the shop counter or a WhatsApp chat, attaches to that customer's profile, so you know who your best buyers are regardless of where they shopped. That is the foundation for loyalty and repeat sales.

The principle is simple to state and powerful in practice: enter each piece of information once, and let it flow everywhere it is needed.

How do you run omnichannel, your store plus ONDC plus marketplaces, from one place?

The goal of everything above is omnichannel selling: being present wherever your customer wants to buy, without multiplying your workload by the number of channels. Done badly, adding a channel means another login, another spreadsheet, and another place stock can go wrong. Done well, each new channel is just another window into the same engine.

Here is what a healthy omnichannel setup looks like in day-to-day terms:

• One catalogue and one inventory feed publishing to your website, app, WhatsApp store, ONDC, and marketplaces at once.
• One combined order inbox where every order lands, no matter which channel it came from.
• One place to update a price or a stock count, with the change reflected everywhere automatically.
• One customer database that unifies online and offline buyers for loyalty, offers, and re-marketing.
• One dashboard showing which channels actually make you money after all fees, so you invest where the margin is.

With this in place, the strategy becomes clear. Use marketplaces and ONDC to get discovered by new buyers, accepting their fees as a cost of acquisition. Then use your owned channels, website, app, and especially WhatsApp, to bring those buyers back at near-zero cost, where your full margin is protected. You get the reach of the big platforms and the profitability of direct selling, without choosing one over the other.

The businesses that win the next few years in Indian ecommerce will not be the ones on the most platforms. They will be the ones running all their platforms from a single, well-organised system, so they can move fast, spend on what works, and keep the customer relationship for themselves.

Where does TheManki fit, and how do you start?

If reading this has convinced you that owning your customer and running clean omnichannel is the right direction, the honest challenge is stitching all these pieces together: website, app, WhatsApp, ONDC, marketplaces, payments, logistics, inventory, POS, and accounts. Doing it well is exactly the kind of engineering work TheManki was built for.

TheManki is an India-based custom software, ERP, and automation company that helps SMB owners move from renting space on someone else's platform to running a business they control. Our tagline, Engineering Business Evolution, is about precisely this shift: from scattered tools and lost margin to one connected system that scales with you.

For sellers, that comes together in Manki Commerce AI, our AI-powered omnichannel ecommerce solution. It brings your storefront, mobile app, and WhatsApp commerce into one place, uses AI to generate product images, video, and SEO-ready content, and keeps payments, logistics, inventory, POS, and your ONDC and marketplace channels in sync from a single dashboard, so you sell everywhere while managing one system.

The best first step is a conversation about your specific products, margins, and channels, with no obligation. Message us on WhatsApp at +91 70022 08642 to book a free strategy call, and we will map out what selling direct could look like for your business, and what it could save you.