What Open Commerce networks mean for a E-Commerce store?
Introduction
As an e-commerce website owner, you need spend considerable effort and money on resolving SEO challenges,social marketing etc to attract customers to your site. By aligning your business with market places(a.k.a ecommerce brokers), you got an additional channel to increase business. Open commerce is the next stage in the evolution of market places where platforms/marketplaces adopt a common protocol such as Beckn and make themselves discoverable and transactable using a standard api interface. ONDC is one of the new age open networks where you could onboard yourself and be discoverable and transactable across other platforms in the network.
How do I onboard to these networks?
Your site will need to implement the beckn protocol. Read more about Beckn protocol here..
Register yourself with the registrar of the particular network (e.g ONDC ) you wish participate in.
Get certified by the network / a certification agency regarding the correct implementation of the protocol for the usecases supported on that network.
Is it so complex?
Not any more. Fortunately, we now have Becknify that makes it easy for you to onboard your existing commerce applications to beckn enabled de-centralized commerce networks. With Becknify you can significantly reduce your engineering time and effort to make your applications compatible with the Beckn protocol and conforming to the technical specifications for each network you wish to participate in.
What would I need to do?
You would need to build a small custom adaptor that would transform beckn api jsons to your platform specific apis and transform the response from your platform to match jsons corresponding to the beckn api’s callback.
Leave beckn plumbing to Becknify
Beckify takes care of:
Signing your outgoing messages,
Verifying signature of incoming messages from the network.
Safe Storage of your encryption keys.
Key rotation as per network policy.
Validate the incoming and outgoing api schemas against the published specifications.
Handle async nature of beckn protocol while offering simplified synchronous apis for your platform to integrate.
Becknify invites beta testing partners.
If you want to test drive Becknify, you can apply to become our beta testing partner.
Author: venky@humbhionline.in
The author is a beckn volunteer, founder of humbhionline and Becknify Sas platform