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The Indian government-backed open e-commerce community has been expanded to facilitate business-to-business (B2B) transactions — months after enabling transactions between consumers and merchants over the open community protocol and widening its reach to the mobility sector.

On Monday, the Open Network for Digital Commerce — generally referred to as ONDC — launched B2B transactions on its interoperable community. Rapidor, a enterprise automation platform primarily based in Kerala, and SignCatch, a SaaS funds startup primarily based in New Delhi, have come on the community to start out B2B transactions between them.

During the testing section that started final month, each startups carried out about 160 cross-transactions on the open community. The ONDC crew mentioned it has another startups within the pipeline for its B2B enlargement, together with Noida-based rural fintech firm Spice Money.

“One of the biggest challenges in digital commerce is even if you help enterprises to digitize, how do we help them to reach across the market? Each of them has to have a separate buying application or a portal they use to call. So now, we are trying to create a standard, which will make all these things a big possibility,” mentioned T Koshy, chief govt officer and managing director at ONDC, throughout the launch.

The Indian authorities established ONDC as a non-profit agency in 2021 to “democratize” digital commerce within the nation — replicating the success of its interoperable cell funds platform UPI which helped Google and Walmart to tackle the competitors from current wallets that every leveraged their very own closed ecosystem. The e-commerce community began its alpha testing in April final yr and kicked off its beta model in September.

Koshy mentioned the open e-commerce community was making about 50,000 every day transactions associated to groceries and meals deliveries. It expects to handle 100,000 every day transactions within the subsequent few months.

ONDC expanded to the mobility sector in March by introducing the on-demand auto rickshaw reserving app Namma Yatri on its community. It can also be open to collaborate with Uber and Ola to additional develop the community.

“B2B has its own nuances because the buyers are different, their priorities are different,” mentioned Koshy. “A pure contractual relationship between the buyer and seller. Everything is different, and there will be some negotiation.”

The Indian authorities is sort of bullish on making ONDC a mainstream system for digital commerce within the nation. The authorities even lately warned e-commerce giants by saying it must “cut off those who are left behind” and urged them to affix the initiative earlier than it’s “too late to join the train.”