Meta to help small Indian businesses come online with ONDC

Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) and Meta on Tuesday partnered to enable small businesses in India to build seamless conversational buyer and seller experiences on WhatsApp through an ecosystem of Meta’s business and technical solution providers. In other words, Meta will educate and support small, medium, and micro businesses to get online to expand their business. Meanwhile, ONDC will help these business solution providers become seller apps, bringing the businesses they service onto the ONDC Network and helping them drive commerce.

To kick off the partnership, five lakh MSMEs (micro, small, and medium enterprises) will be digitally upskilled through the Meta Small Business Academy, which has committed to up-skill 10 million small businesses across the country, over the next two years. Meta Small Business Academy offers a certification to empower entrepreneurs and marketers to gain critical digital marketing skills to grow on the Meta apps.

“Our partnership with Meta will not only digitally upskill these businesses but will also enable them to connect with a customer base far and wide,” said T Koshy, MD & CEO of ONDC. “We are confident that our collaborative efforts will pave the way for millions of small businesses by providing them with the right impetus for growth,” he added.

Sandhya Devanathan, Vice President of Meta India, said that India’s digital transformation story is revolutionary. “Our partnership with ONDC builds on supporting the government’s vision for Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and furthering our ongoing commitment to skilling small businesses and aiding this rapid digital transformation and growth story in the country,” she added.

Both Meta and ONDC, however, did not comment on whether they are planning to integrate shopping experience on Meta’s platforms, such as Facebook Marketplace and Instagram Shopping, with ONDC.

As part of the partnership, Meta will also support Sahayak, ONDC’s WhatsApp chatbot, in enhancing the services offered on the bot as the single point of seller communication and customer communication for ONDC.

Earlier this year, Meta launched the ‘WhatsApp Se Wyapaar’ programme to upskill 10 million traders across 29 states in 11 Indian languages on the WhatsApp Business app. Today, there are more than 200 million users of the WhatsApp Business app across the world, and more than 60 per cent of people on WhatsApp in India message a business account.

— Written with inputs from IANS