Do you Beckn?

What’s Beckn?

Beckn is a domain agnostic protocol that enables parties involved in an economic transaction to collaboratively deliver a smooth fulfilment experience.

Beckn enables platforms to play by their strengths and collaborate with each other to provide a rich experience to all stakeholders.

for e.g.

  • Seller platforms can focus on seller acquisition and providing the best experience to sellers onboarded on their platform.

  • Service Provider platforms can focus on providing the best experience to service providers onboarded on their platform.

  • Buyer platforms can focus on customer acquisition and providing the best buying experience to customers using their platform.

  • Delivery platforms can focus on acquiring delivery partners and providing the best experience to these partners using their platform.

Recognizing the pattern

Beckn protocol was born in the mobility domain. Later it was extended to e-retail. By this time a pattern clearly emerged that could be leveraged for many domains where users typically:

  1. Search for a product/service.

  2. Discover providers offering the product/service.

  3. Explore the options at hand.

  4. Book product/service with a provider.

After its success with mobility & e-retail, Communities are actively working in adapting the protocol for health care, public transport and education services.

How is all this made possible

At its heart, the beckn protocol design is built on the following concepts:

  1. Generalised schema objects. Like item, category provider….

  2. Generalised apis like search, select , init and confirm using generalised schema objects.

  3. Signed api calls between participants.

  4. Public keys of all collaborating participants stored in a registry. Participants can lookup each other’s public keys from this registry to validate signatures received with incoming payloads.

  5. Responding to callers with an acknowledgement for the request immediately and sending the actual response later over a callback url exposed by the calling party. This ensures that the networks are not blocked due to latency in servers belonging to some participants.

  6. A well defined methodology to extend the protocol for a domain or network.

Interesting?, Read on…

Whatever be your domain that follows the above mentioned pattern, you can implement relevant beckn APIs to enable other platforms to discover and communicate with your platform. To learn about the APIs and how to implement them, you may read at https://developers.becknprotocol.io.

Implementing beckn API spec and opening up your platform for collaborating with other platforms is sometimes referred as becknizing or becknifiying your application.

Ok, How do I begin?

  1. If you are implementing by yourself, you can ask your questions and clarify doubts in the friendly beckn open collective discord channels. You can join the community here

  2. Members in the community, have generously open-sourced several code/ snippets in different languages.Make use of these while creating your implementation.

  3. Beckn protocol server is another community driven project. You can deploy this server in your network and let is handle the security and responding aspects of the protocol. While you focus on the processing api payload and firing a callback if applicable.

  4. Commercial Sas Platforms such as becknify may be also leveraged. These platforms take care of the beckn plumbling work and allow you to focus on your business apis. These platforms:

    • Manage your network subscriptions

    • Manage your signing and encryption keys (creation,storage and rotation)

    • Ensure incoming payloads have valid signatures and comply with beckn api schema.

    • Ensures outgoing payloads are signed on your behalf and comply with beckn api schema.

    • Deliver validated incoming payloads to your application’s endpoint that could be a no-content returning webhook, a message queue or a url that returns a synchronous response to the request from the network.

    • Deliver outgoing payloads from your application to the network complying with beckn protocol. becknify in particular, can be asked to consolidate callbacks from network participants and deliver synchronously as a response to your outgoing request.

Testing my application with other participants.

Beckn foundation has generously hosted Beckn open network. This is a test network, where you can test your becknified applications. Once all tests are satisfactorily completed, your application can graduate to join public open networks such as ondc.

Network policy

Any open public network, you join, would have its own set of policies that all network participants would agree to before going live on that network. It would have agreements regarding revenue sharing, network fee and several other components. Beckn foundation or the platforms you may use to onboard on the networks don’t control these policies and you will need to read the policy documents completely and thoroughly before you agree to the policies of the respective networks.

Conclusion

There are far reaching consequences of the beckn protocol we have just started scratching the surface now. It is ushering a new begining to the way commerce and larger digital economic transactions will be done in future. As an Indian, I feel proud of this contribution to the world from India.

Author: venky@humbhionline.in

The author is a beckn volunteer, founder of humbhionline and Becknify Sas platform