India’s digital commerce landscape just shifted — and if you run a small or medium-sized business, this shift is directly in your favour.
In May 2026, Zoho Corporation announced an investment of ₹70 crore into the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), India’s government-backed initiative to create an open, interoperable commerce infrastructure. The move was not a headline grab. It was a deliberate, considered commitment by one of India’s most successful technology companies to the idea that Indian businesses should not be permanently beholden to the rules, commissions, and algorithms of a handful of large marketplace platforms.
For the country’s 63 million-plus MSMEs, the implications run deep.
What ONDC Actually Is (and Why It Matters More Than You Think)
ONDC is not another app or another marketplace. It is a protocol — a set of open standards that allows buyers, sellers, logistics providers, and payment systems to connect directly without needing to sit inside a single company’s walled ecosystem.
Think of it like the UPI moment for commerce. UPI did not build one super-app for payments; it built the rails that let any app, any bank, and any merchant talk to each other. ONDC is attempting the same structural shift for buying and selling goods and services across India.
The problem it solves is structural. When an MSME sells on a dominant marketplace today, it faces discovery fees, listing restrictions, mandatory discount participation, data opacity, and ever-changing commission structures. The platform sets the rules because the platform owns the relationship with the customer. ONDC breaks that dependency by enabling sellers and buyers to transact across different apps, without one platform controlling the entire chain.
This is precisely why Zoho’s investment is significant. Zoho is not investing in ONDC as an experiment. It is investing because its core product suite — Zoho Commerce, Zoho Books, Zoho Inventory, and its seller app Vikra — is already integrated with the ONDC network, and because the company sees an open commerce layer as foundational to India’s digital sovereignty ambitions.
Why Zoho Made This Move
Sridhar Vembu has been consistent for years in his view that India’s digital future should be built on Indian technology and open infrastructure, not on foreign platforms extracting value from Indian commerce. The ONDC investment is a natural extension of that position.
But it is also a practical business decision. Zoho’s SME-facing product stack is wide: Zoho Books handles accounting, Zoho Inventory manages stock, Zoho Commerce powers storefronts, and Vikra — Zoho’s dedicated ONDC seller application — connects merchants directly to the ONDC buyer network. Putting ₹70 crore into ONDC’s infrastructure strengthens the entire ecosystem that Zoho has been building around these tools.
The investment supports ONDC’s long-term goal of making interoperable commerce infrastructure accessible to every business type, irrespective of size. For a kirana owner in Coimbatore, a garment manufacturer in Tirupur, or a packaged foods brand in Pune, the implication is the same: access to a national buyer base without giving up margin to platform intermediaries.
The Real Opportunity for Your Business
Here is where the picture becomes concrete for an MSME owner or operations head reading this.
If your business currently sells entirely through one or two large marketplaces, you have a concentrated risk. Any change to the platform’s fee structure, ranking algorithm, or terms of service directly impacts your revenue, and you have limited recourse. ONDC, supported by Zoho’s tooling, offers a genuine alternative.
Through Zoho’s Vikra app, MSME sellers can list products and services on the ONDC network and become discoverable to buyers across any ONDC-compatible buyer app. The transactions settle through standard payment rails, logistics can be plugged in from ONDC-registered providers, and critically, the data about your customers and your orders is yours.
Connect Vikra to Zoho Books and Zoho Inventory, and the operational layer runs coherently: an order placed through ONDC updates your inventory, triggers an invoice, and flows into your accounts automatically. The manual work of reconciling orders from multiple channels — the spreadsheet, the WhatsApp message, the courier copy — compresses significantly.
This is not a future state. These integrations are live today, and businesses are already using them. Zoho’s investment accelerates the network’s growth and the tooling around it, but the foundation is in place now.
The Broader Picture: Digital Sovereignty Is a Business Advantage
Zoho’s ONDC move sits within a broader set of commitments the company has made to India’s technology ecosystem in 2026 — from the Nathu La data centre to its MoU with the Indian Army under the JAI mission, to its prior investments in rural tech education. The pattern is consistent: Zoho is building for India’s long-term digital self-sufficiency.
For Indian businesses, aligning with that infrastructure is not just patriotic sentiment. It is a practical hedge against the growing concentration risk of depending on foreign-owned platforms for your commercial reach. Every rupee of commission you redirect away from a global marketplace and into your own direct channel compounds over time.
ONDC is at an early stage of network density — buyer-side adoption is still growing. But that also means businesses that establish their presence now, build their ONDC-integrated tooling, and learn the system while it is young will be better positioned as the network scales. First-mover advantage in infrastructure adoption is real.
What Should You Actually Do?
If you are running an MSME in India and you have not yet looked at ONDC as a channel, the practical starting point is straightforward.
First, assess your current channel mix. Where are your orders coming from, what are the effective margins after platform commissions, and what data do you own about your customers? This baseline matters because it tells you what you stand to gain.
Second, look at your operational tooling. If you are already using Zoho Books or Zoho Inventory, the path to ONDC integration through Vikra is relatively short. If you are running disconnected tools — a standalone accounting package, a separate inventory sheet, manual order entry — the conversation is about building a coherent operational stack first, from which ONDC becomes one channel among several.
Third, think about your storefront. Zoho Commerce gives you a branded direct-to-consumer channel alongside your ONDC presence. The two reinforce each other: ONDC brings discovery, your own storefront builds the direct relationship.
Implementing this stack well requires more than switching on a subscription. The integration between your Vikra seller setup, Zoho Inventory, Zoho Books, and Zoho Commerce needs to be configured correctly for your product catalogue, tax setup, logistics workflow, and reconciliation requirements. Getting that configuration right from the outset saves considerable remediation work later.
How Tech Magify Can Help
Tech Magify has been implementing Zoho’s full business suite for clients across India for over two decades. We understand the operational detail of these tools — not as a list of features, but as a working system that has to function correctly under real order volumes, real tax scenarios, and real customer expectations.
If your business is ready to build an ONDC-integrated commerce operation on Zoho’s stack, or if you want to understand what the migration from your current tooling to a Zoho-native setup would involve, the conversation starts with a discovery call.
Book one at bookings.techmagify.com — no obligation, and no generic pitch. We will look at your current setup and tell you honestly where Zoho adds value and how the integration should be structured.
Zoho has just invested ₹70 crore in India’s open commerce future. The question for your business is whether you are positioned to benefit from it.
Tech Magify is a Zoho Advanced Implementation Partner with offices across India. We implement the full Zoho ecosystem for businesses in manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, FMCG, and professional services.