Bharat in BetaNext Gen Ventures
Venture proposals for commerce, logistics and financial services. 8 briefs in this collection.
Collection guide · ONDC Build for Bharat
Who owns the handoff in open commerce?
18 historical problems about what happens between a seller, a buyer app and a logistics provider. Four paths for founders who want to investigate the work between them.
ONDC, the Open Network for Digital Commerce, presented Build for Bharat as a programme for developing solutions to commerce problems. Its 2023–24 call separates ventures, foundational components and solutions for network participants. The useful thread running through these briefs is responsibility: who keeps a catalogue current, checks delivery coverage or explains an offer when several parties are involved?
This programme has concluded. The date on the Atlas records, 10 February 2024, is the submission deadline shown on the historical challenge page, which separately lists registration closing on 31 January. ONDC’s quarterly update (PDF, page 10) records the launch on 4 December 2023 and conclusion on 28 May 2024.
Three tracks in the original call
The source grouped the problems by the kind of output it wanted. Its programme recap (PDF, page 11) explains the distinction.
Foundational
Proofs of concept for components used across the network. 5 briefs in this collection.
Scalable Solution
Working solutions to friction experienced by network participants. 5 briefs in this collection.
Four ways into the problems
These are Bharat in Beta’s investigation paths across the original tracks. Each begins with a particular participant and a piece of work to observe, rather than assuming the historical ask still describes an unsolved problem.
Make a seller’s catalogue usable and current
In the briefs. The briefs cover seller onboarding, grocery operations, catalogue scoring, pricing, digitisation and indexing. Pricing recommendations leave the offered price with the seller.Our reading. Uploading products and keeping them buyable are different jobs. An attractive catalogue is little use if a stock change or corrected variant never reaches the buyer app. The full onboarding proposal includes registration and seller support; the digitisation component addresses the narrower task of turning store information into catalogue entries. Scoring and indexing then ask whether those entries are usable and retrievable.A place to start. Follow one grocery seller and its seller app from an incomplete catalogue to a buyer’s search result. Use an authorised sample to trace corrections, stock changes and price validity. Compare accepted, accurate and current entries, plus the work needed to correct them, rather than upload speed alone. A transparent quality score could help route corrections; it would not itself certify compliance.Questions to test. Does catalogue preparation delay the seller’s first usable listing, or does most work occur later when stock, prices and variants change? When the seller corrects an entry, does the buyer app receive the intended version without another manual catalogue repair?
Help a buyer move from a request to clear terms
In the briefs. Language support, conversational shopping, personalisation and negotiation address different parts of a buyer’s journey. Negotiation includes offers, counteroffers and termination.Our reading. A fluent answer is only one part of a purchase. A buyer also needs to understand the product and the terms being offered. The conversational brief includes an immersive shopping experience, so reducing it to a support chatbot would lose part of the ask. Personalisation adds a separate question: which participant has the information needed to improve that experience?A place to start. Choose one language, one product category and consenting adult participants. Observe a request through product comparison and a clearly reviewed offer, including its price, validity and conditions. Record misunderstandings, support requests and abandoned choices. Keep any acceptance of negotiated terms an explicit user action during the investigation.Questions to test. Can buyers explain the selected product and offer conditions correctly, and complete the chosen journey with fewer support requests? Does a specific, permitted piece of customer information improve the choice compared with a journey that does not collect it?
Make the fulfilment promise survive the next handoff
In the briefs. The logistics briefs connect serviceability, routing, hyperlocal delivery cost and returns. Return checks must also respect the customer experience and pickup time.Our reading. Coverage, route choice and a successful pickup belong to different steps. A faster serviceability lookup cannot fix a promise based on stale coverage. A cheaper delivery estimate means little if exceptions create extra support or return trips. The reverse-logistics brief makes the trade-off concrete: more checking can change both fraudulent returns and legitimate customers’ experience.A place to start. Work with one merchant group and a logistics participant in a defined area. Replay permitted or synthetic coverage updates, deliveries and return cases. Identify who confirms each handoff and resolves a disagreement. Compare fulfilled promises, exception work, pickup time, complaints and the full delivery cost. Treat the old cost target as a question to recalculate under today’s conditions.Questions to test. Do coverage updates reach the buyer app before it promises delivery, and which failed orders would fresher information have prevented? Do the proposed pickup checks identify disputed returns without increasing delays or complaints for legitimate customers?
Start with information a participant may actually share
In the briefs. Advertising and data services address distributed information. Separate briefs explore agricultural finance and product requirements. ONDC is described as a facilitator, without automatic visibility into every transaction.Our reading. The first product decision is whose information can support whose decision. Campaign reporting and participant insights may share that constraint, but agricultural lending and regulatory reference are distinct specialist businesses. The finance brief is specifically about agricultural micro-entrepreneurs and a decentralised lending ecosystem, not a generic credit score. The compliance brief asks for structured requirements and updates, not a legal guarantee.A place to start. For an initial information service, investigate one seller participant’s campaign reconciliation using records it can authorise for that purpose. Identify the report’s buyer, the decision it supports and the missing information before proposing a network-wide dataset. For the separate finance path, first identify a qualified financing partner and investigate the agricultural workflow. For product requirements, test a source-linked change log with expert review before any compliance claim.Questions to test. Can a participant supply the information needed for an actionable report under its actual permissions and transaction agreements? Will a named buyer use the report to make a different decision and pay for it, or is the missing information unavailable even to that buyer?
Take one handoff seriously
Find the participant who has the problem today
Ask that participant to show a recent failure, its workaround and who bears the cost. Then check what has changed since this call. The old briefs identify work to investigate; they do not establish present demand or willingness to pay.
Before a live pilot, check the current network specifications and data agreements. The finance and product-requirements paths also need current specialist advice. Map data and routing tools need their own licence and usage checks; the historical title alone does not make every named service open source.