From Marketplaces to Merchant-Owned Logistics
Ratnesh Verma, CEO of Pidge, on on-demand delivery logistics in India
The real shift is from renting demand on a marketplace to owning the customer relationship. A small restaurant can accept marketplace fees in exchange for orders it could not generate alone, but a growing brand wants its own repeat customers, its own packaging, its own delivery promise, and its own order data. That is what pushes merchants toward 1PL or a white label logistics layer instead of staying inside a marketplace forever.
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Marketplace economics and control work differently from pure logistics. Zomato’s model is built around commission on orders placed through its app, and its terms define customer data as information provided through the Zomato application and limit restaurant use of that data beyond order fulfillment. That means the marketplace owns the shopper surface and the merchant gets demand, but not full control.
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Pidge is built for the merchants that have already learned how to generate demand themselves. In the interview, the bottleneck is not customer acquisition software, it is reliable delivery that can scale beyond an in house rider fleet. Pidge positions itself as the neutral layer, charging by volume, distance, and handling needs rather than taking a cut of GMV, which fits brands that want logistics without giving up the customer relationship.
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India’s market is also moving toward more open commerce rails. ONDC is designed around separate buyer and seller applications and says transaction data resides with those apps rather than the network itself. That structure points to a broader shift away from closed marketplaces toward interoperable demand and logistics layers, where merchants can be discovered widely without surrendering the whole customer relationship to one app.
Going forward, the winners in urban delivery will split into two lanes. Closed marketplaces will keep dominating merchant acquisition for long tail sellers that need demand. City logistics networks and open commerce infrastructure will grow with brands that already have demand and now need control, consistency, and better unit economics as order volume scales.