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Agree with @whitelotus . While the overall idea is very revolutionary and (I sincerely hope) will fly for many applications, bashing Swiggy-Zomato and forecasting their demise would be premature. . I think it has become this sensational phenomenon because of media outlets and LinkedIn / Twitter influencers are just trying to increase their TRP by bashing these Unicorns (a very effective means of gathering audience). . I look upon it like a passing fad, as it so happened 3-4 years ago when WhatsApp had updated their privacy policy to incorporate sharing chats data with Facebook. Everyone including rickshaw-walas were trending #BoycottWhatsApp and encouraging all to move to Signal, and after the initial euphoria died down everybody returned to WhatsApp.
Furthermore the experience of single transaction being carried out by 3-4 independent parties vs one single entity seamlessly stitching everything together under one roof is expected to be vastly different in quality. And of course the media and attention hungry influencers of social media purposely only talk about those cases where price difference between food-tech players vs ONDC was highest. As it turns out, price differences might not often be that huge, and in fact at times our established players might even trump ONDC . For eg take this latest report from MidDay https://www.mid-day.com/mumbai/mumbai-news/article/ondc-still-has-some-catching-up-to-do-23285620 . .. .. Add to that players like PayTM offering ONDC will soon find it hard to offer same rich experience of Zomato/Swiggy on a general purpose e-commerce platform. For eg elaborate ratings, trustworthy, moderated reviews, good quality food and ambience photos, well organised menu items etc: these players have invested years worth of time and energy into building something that feels quintessential today, replicating that in a short span would be unrealistic for new entrants . .. Still end of the day price commands highest leverage in India and as @whitelotus already points out once those promotional subsidies by govt run out foodies might not have enough incentive to remain away from Swiggy-Zomato . (I agree that govt's move to end monopolies in this space is much welcomed, yet without actually snapping the wings of the freely operating companies, it'll be hard to influence consumers. For eg recall what happened with anti-China sentiments post Galwan incident. For sometime there was an ire and cry to boycott Chinese products, but since govt didn't impose much punishment on their brands to make our own ones competitive, guess which manufacturers soon rebounded and continue to rule the smartphone market today. Indian consumers don't care about larger good, they are too busy celebrating shallow discounts)
thanks for publishing full PhD on this topic
Very unlikely due to following reasons
ONDC costs are currently lower only due to discounts
Food aggregator platforms can only become good if their underlying tech is rock solid. Both swiggy and zomato have cracked this
Delivery fleet is a big enough challenge, hence ONDC delivery fleet is currently backed by Zomato (there could be more partners as well)
Zomato and Swiggy generally took liability for faulty orders. What happens with ONDC here? Will paytm take liability if fassos mess up someone's order?
But ONDC in itself is such an ambitious and people centric initiative, hope it gets the right and strong people to drive to it's vision ❤️
