What Is Beckn Protocol, The Technology Poised To Redefine E-Commerce

It’s the weekend in Kochi. In the middle of texting your friend on Telegram, you wonder whether you both should meet up shortly for filter coffee. After deciding to go ahead, you proceed to book a ride for the local cafe.

As things go, you would quit the Telegram app, move to one or more ride-hailing apps, depending on your general luck with finding a cab or an autorickshaw, move through various steps on the apps, and wait anxiously until a ride is confirmed.

Not with Stayhalo, a chatbot on Telegram that allows you to book a cab just as you would text a friend — without leaving Telegram to do so. Stayhalo, therefore, eases the otherwise-annoying process of hailing a cab.

But the magic is not in what Stayhalo is able to do, though it’s pretty cool by itself — the magic is in what truly enables it.

Beckn Protocol

The “Beckn protocol”, or simply “Beckn”, is an open protocol for enabling decentralised, peer-to-peer commerce and service interactions.

It’s a “protocol” in that it’s a virtual repository of well-defined specifications that’s open for anyone to see, modify, and use for themselves for the purpose of building more digital public goods within the overarching vision of maintaining a free and open digital economy.

Its specifications enable Beckn to act as a transaction protocol that allows discovery, ordering, fulfilment and payment between buyers and sellers in the digital marketplace.

The idea was birthed in November 2018, with the name “Beckn” coined in July 2019.

What Beckn does is, it loosens the grip of particular heavyweight apps or platforms over digital transactions, like booking a cab, ordering food, and buying clothes, and makes the Internet a level-playing field.

It is like a universal (“open source”) translator for apps and devices. Just as a translator helps people speaking different languages understand each other, Beckn helps different technologies communicate and work together smoothly. Think of it like a link language.

Beckn enables decentralised marketplaces where users can access various services within a single app. For instance, you’d be able to order food from any restaurant using just one app, not having to go on to individual restaurant apps or food delivery apps. The protocol makes such a task possible by enabling different services to talk to each other seamlessly.

Luckily for us all, this innovation places a strong emphasis on privacy, allowing users to control their data and decide who can access it.

Beckn, therefore, reimagines e-commerce. It democratises digital commerce by making it open and inclusive to anyone at all, sizing down the role and influence of the handful of e-commerce giants that dominate and gate-keep the highly active e-tail space.

Lest you think it’s an app, it isn’t one (can’t have yet another app). Neither is it a superapp nor a platform.

For an analogy, the Beckn protocol is similar to the email protocol Simple Mail Transfer Protocol or SMTP, which lets email senders and recipients use their preferred email systems or providers without any intermediary controlling the communication. So, you are able to send an email from Gmail to Yahoo Mail or Hotmail without being bound by a particular specific email provider. This is different from, for instance, WhatsApp messaging, where chats can only occur on the WhatsApp platform, and not from WhatsApp to iMessage.

Beckn for digital commerce similarly shares a likeness with the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for the Internet and the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) for digital payments. While UPI is a payment infrastructure that enables instant bank transfers, various third-party payment apps use the UPI technology to facilitate digital transactions.

So it is with Beckn. It creates an open and inclusive network where, in its major use case of e-commerce, sellers and buyers can conduct transactions directly over the network rather than inside particular apps and platforms.

Beckn Applications

Stayhalo, the example considered to begin with, is a Beckn-enabled Telegram chatbot. It lets anyone book taxis and view metro schedules through a messaging app, for which it taps into the Kochi Open Mobility Network (KOMN).

KOMN is not limited to auto or taxi booking. It can be used to locate parking spaces and find electric-vehicle (EV) charging stations, with more use cases to follow in the hospitality, healthcare, and other industries.

Some of the notable existing open networks built on top of Beckn include KOMN, the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), the United Health Interface (UHI), and the United Energy Interface (UEI).

Namma Yatri, an autorickshaw-booking mobile app for Bengalureans, is another example of a sustainable, long-term mobility solution via a mobile app that’s built on the Beckn protocol. It is built and operated by Juspay, which has a similar offering in Kochi called Yatri. (The Kochi service goes beyond autorickshaws.)

Namma Yatri has cut customer and driver dependency on specific ride-hailing apps like Uber and Ola, which might have certain policies that both parties might find restrictive and disadvantageous, for booking auto rides. The network’s success is telling — as of writing this article (22 February 2024), 2.76 crore trips have been completed using the network, resulting in driver earnings of over Rs 415.84 crore. Close to 50 lakh users and 2.15 lakh drivers are benefiting from the platform.

Beckn Through ONDC

ONDC is the open-network biggie in India built on Beckn. The initiative backed by the Indian government is aimed at creating a digital commerce ecosystem that is open, inclusive, and transparent. It is designed to provide a level-playing field for all participants in the digital commerce space, including buyers, sellers, and service providers, aligned with Beckn’s vision.

It’s no wonder that its key features are all that Beckn is going for — interoperability, data privacy, transparency, and inclusivity.

ONDC users can access a wide range of products and services from various providers through a single interface. Their data remains private and secure. There is transparency in digital commerce transactions, while all participants in the digital commerce ecosystem, including small and medium enterprises (SMEs), are able to participate and benefit from the network.

ONDC has been growing from strength to strength since its launch in 2022. It crossed 5 million transactions in a month for the first time in December 2023.

The network climbed further to 6.5 million transactions across retail and mobility in January 2024, up from 1,281 transactions in January 2023 across grocery and food.

Retail purchases on ONDC have surged by over 1,700 times between the start of 2023 and the end. Merchants on the platform have also grown from 5,600 last January to more than 300,000 at the start of 2024.

“Probably by the end of this year, we may see 50 million transactions a day,” Thampy Koshy, ONDC managing director and chief executive officer (CEO), told retail intelligence portal IndiaRetailing.com earlier this week.

ONDC is getting on board some big names as collaborators. Meta, for instance, is partnering with ONDC to help 500,000 small businesses leverage digital commerce within the next two years. The collaboration aims “to enable and educate small businesses in building seamless conversational buyer and seller experiences on WhatsApp” by way of Meta’s business and technical solution providers.

This week, Uber signed a pact with ONDC. “Our vision for Uber in India is to serve the mobility needs of all Indians. This is in line with ONDC's objective of democratising digital commerce,” said Prabhjeet Singh, president, Uber India and South Asia. This move by the cab aggregator giant has come months after its rival in India, Ola, joined the ONDC to provide food delivery services from September 2023.

During a TechSparks 2023 panel discussion, Sujith Nair, co-founder and CEO of the Foundation for Interoperability in Digital Economy (FIDE), said ONDC is similar to the Internet, yet different. While the Internet treats all websites equally, ONDC can distinguish between an e-commerce website and a banking website. He noted that ONDC picks up where the Internet leaves off.

Nair’s FIDE is the not-for-profit organisation behind the Beckn protocol.

Owing to its great potential, Beckn has been drawing interest beyond India, as well. It is powering Africa’s first-ever open network, called the Open Gambia Network (OGa), since December 2023. OGa is set to transform digital commerce in the Gambia and West African regions.

Transport departments and civic communities in European cities such as Paris, Zurich, and Amsterdam, for instance, are considering adopting Beckn to enhance the interoperability of its urban mobility services.

As the Beckn protocol evolves and expands, both across industries and geographies, it looks all set to revolutionise the way we think about and engage in e-commerce.

For, in the age of closed-off, competitive platform-centric marketplaces, Beckn stands out as an open digital infrastructure that enables the development of a decentralised digital market. There’s wisdom, virtue, and commerce in that.