Google in Talks to Join ONDC

Alphabet Inc.'s Google has negotiated with the Indian government to integrate its shopping service into the country's open e-commerce network ONDC, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

At the end of last month, India soft-launched the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) as the government is trying to end its dominance of US companies Amazon.com and Walmart in the fast-growing e-commerce market.

Google's talks follow the success of the payments business through the government's financial trading initiative, the Unified Payments Interface, one source said.

Google's existing shopping business only acts as an online listing aggregator and does not perform order processing such as shipping like Amazon does. The ONDC program aims to cover at least 100 cities and towns and join 30 million sellers and 10 million online retailers by August.

Partners of the ONDC project, including the Indian fintech company Paytm, now display each other's list in the platform search results. The government's goal is to create fair competition by lowering the cost of doing business for all sellers who want to offer their products online.