Flipkart Enters Food Delivery at 10% Commission on ONDC: What It Means for India's Restaurants

Posted on 4th Sep 2026 06:12:29 in Business, Digital Marketing

Tagged as: food delivery, ONDC, Flipkart, restaurants, SME growth

For the better part of a decade, Indian restaurants had exactly two serious options when they wanted to sell online: Swiggy and Zomato. Both platforms charged commissions that, depending on the order and the restaurant's negotiating power, could run anywhere from 16 percent to 30 percent of the bill. That era of a settled duopoly is now being tested from an unexpected direction. Walmart-owned Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce marketplace, is entering food delivery with a commission of roughly 10 percent, and it is doing so on the government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) rather than by building yet another closed marketplace. The implications for restaurant owners, cloud kitchens and food-focused small businesses go well beyond one more app to install.

What Flipkart Is Actually Doing

According to reports from Moneycontrol and other outlets, Flipkart has begun onboarding restaurants in Bengaluru ahead of a food delivery rollout that was targeted around mid-August 2026, with a national expansion to follow once the pilot stabilises. The service will be available both inside the main Flipkart app and through a dedicated standalone food delivery app, which means the company is tapping an existing base of hundreds of millions of Indian shoppers rather than trying to build distribution from scratch.

The reported commission is the headline number: around 10 percent, against the roughly 16-30 percent that incumbents have typically charged. The initiative is being led by Ashish Vijayvergiya, previously chief of staff to Flipkart Group CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy, which signals that food delivery is being treated as a strategic mandate rather than a side experiment. Flipkart executives have said the company would only enter the category if it could offer a differentiated value proposition, and the differentiation here is structural: an open-network architecture with a sharply lower take rate.

Why ONDC Changes the Delivery Game

ONDC works differently from a marketplace like Swiggy or Zomato. Instead of one platform controlling discovery, ordering and fulfilment, the network connects seller apps and buyer apps through common protocols, in the same spirit as UPI opened up digital payments. A restaurant listed through a seller app on ONDC becomes visible to shoppers on any buyer app connected to the network, without having to sign a separate contract with each one.

For Flipkart, this removes the need to build and maintain a closed merchant network and proprietary logistics stack from day one. It can ride existing ONDC-compatible seller apps and logistics providers, which lowers its cost of entry enormously and is precisely what allows a 10 percent commission to be viable where incumbents claim their 20-30 percent take rates barely cover the cost of running a delivery business. For restaurants, ONDC flips the relationship: the store keeps its catalogue, its ratings are portable, and it is no longer locked into whichever platform happened to bring the customer.

The Commission Math: What 10 Percent Means for a Restaurant

Commission is the single largest cost line in online food delivery, and the gap between 10 percent and 25-30 percent is the difference between a profitable channel and a marketing expense. Consider a mid-sized restaurant doing Rs 10 lakh of delivery business a month through an aggregator. At a 25 percent commission, the platform keeps Rs 2.5 lakh before the restaurant pays anything for discounts, ads or packaging. At 10 percent, the platform keeps Rs 1 lakh, freeing roughly Rs 1.5 lakh a month that goes straight back into the unit economics of the kitchen.

That is why restaurant associations have reacted to the news the way they have: a credible large player quoting 10 percent becomes a benchmark every restaurant can wave at the next negotiation. The caveat, and it is an important one, is that headline commission is not the whole cost. Platforms also earn from delivery fees charged to customers, from advertising placements and from promotions that restaurants are pressed to fund. Swiggy's food delivery chief Rohit Kapoor made the incumbent argument when he questioned zero-commission models, saying that platforms must eventually recover the cost of operating a marketplace: "There will be charges." The practical question for any restaurant owner is not what the sticker says, but what percentage of the final bill actually lands in the bank after all deductions on each platform.

A Market That Is Suddenly Competitive Again

Flipkart is not alone in attacking the duopoly. Rapido's Ownly, a zero-commission food delivery service, has scaled to more than 40,000 daily orders across nearly 25,000 restaurants in Bengaluru within a few months of citywide operations, capturing an estimated 7-10 percent of the city's market. Swiggy has responded with Toing, a lower-take-rate offering aimed directly at price-sensitive restaurant partners, and Zomato's parent Eternal has the deepest loyalty ecosystem to defend through memberships like Gold. The incumbents also carry real scale: Swiggy reported food delivery gross order value of Rs 9,490 crore in the June 2026 quarter, growing 17.4 percent year on year, with 19.2 million monthly transacting users.

What matters for business owners is not who wins the food delivery war, but that the war has restarted. Competition for restaurant partners translates into lower take rates, better discoverability terms and more negotiating leverage for the first time in years. It also carries risk: a restaurant that spreads itself across five platforms without the kitchen capacity to handle peak-hour volume on all of them will see order cancellation rates climb, and rankings on every platform punish cancellations.

What Restaurant Owners Should Do Now

None of this requires a restaurant to bet on Flipkart today. The sensible moves are smaller and more concrete. First, get listed on ONDC through a seller app if you have not already, so your catalogue is visible across every buyer app as the network grows, Flipkart included. Second, audit your real cost per order on every platform you use: add commission, ad spend, discount share and packaging, then compare against what the same order earns when it comes direct or through a low-take-rate channel. Third, treat multi-platform presence as a portfolio, not a loyalty pledge; keep the channels that clear your margin threshold after all deductions, and prune the ones that only produce vanity order counts.

• List your menu on ONDC now, while the network effect is still forming.
• Measure net revenue per order per platform, not just gross order volume.
• Renegotiate take rates using the 10 percent benchmark as leverage.
• Cap discount-funded promotions so low-commission channels stay profitable.
• Watch delivery quality on ONDC rails before shifting high volumes away from proven logistics.

The broader lesson for every small business watching this from outside food delivery is that India's open networks, UPI first and now ONDC, keep lowering the cost of reaching customers without surrendering control of the customer relationship. The platforms that once set the terms are now competing for partners on price, and that is a shift worth understanding even if you never sell a single plate of food.

Sources

• Moneycontrol — Flipkart eyes food delivery launch around August 15, targets 10% commission
• Moneycontrol — Rapido's Ownly hits 7% of Bengaluru food delivery market, gears up for India expansion
• Moneycontrol — Swiggy's Rohit Kapoor questions Rapido's zero-commission model: 'There will be charges'
• SAHI — Flipkart Aims To Launch Food Delivery By August 15 With 10% Commission