Flipkart has started onboarding Bengaluru restaurants for a food delivery app charging roughly 10% commission — against the 16% to 30% that Swiggy and Zomato currently charge, depending on the restaurant and category. The timing is not an accident. It lands in the same city, and the same month, that more than a thousand Bengaluru restaurant owners have been publicly threatening to boycott both incumbent platforms over commission rates, with a deadline currently set for August 31. A Walmart-owned company with roughly 350 million registered users on its main shopping app is walking into that dispute with a number designed to look impossible to refuse.
It is also not a new idea. Restaurants in Bengaluru have had cheaper alternatives to choose from for months, and the duopoly still controls essentially the entire market.
The commission math, laid out
| Platform | Commission | Model |
|---|---|---|
| Swiggy / Zomato | 16%–30% | Proprietary network |
| Flipkart | ~10% | Built on ONDC |
| Ownly (Rapido) | 0% | Flat ₹30 delivery fee to customer |
| ONDC network overall | 3%–5% | Open, multi-app network |
Flipkart is building its service on ONDC — the government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce, which lets any compliant app plug into a shared marketplace instead of building a closed one from scratch. ONDC's own reported commissions across its 616-plus live cities run even lower than Flipkart's, in the 3%–5% range. And Rapido's Ownly, which launched in Bengaluru in March with zero commission and a flat ₹30 delivery fee funded entirely by the customer, has already run the "undercut the incumbents on price" playbook once this year, with a stated goal of ten cities by July.
None of it has dented Zomato and Swiggy's grip. Zomato holds roughly 60% of India's restaurant food delivery market and Swiggy the remaining 40%, meaning between them the two companies still account for something north of 95% of every order placed. ONDC-connected apps, Ownly included, are splitting whatever is left.
The network Flipkart chose matters as much as the price
Flipkart didn't have to build on ONDC — it could have built a closed app of its own, the way Swiggy and Zomato did. Plugging into the government-backed network instead means Flipkart's restaurant listings and order flow are, in principle, visible to any other ONDC-compliant app too, not walled inside Flipkart's own ecosystem the way Swiggy and Zomato's restaurant relationships are walled inside theirs. That's a genuinely different bet: Flipkart is trading some of the lock-in a proprietary network would give it for faster restaurant onboarding and lower infrastructure cost, on the theory that its own brand and existing customer base do the retention work a closed network would otherwise be built to do. Whether that trade pays off depends entirely on whether Flipkart shoppers actually open the food-delivery flow inside an app they associate with electronics and fashion, not on the ONDC plumbing underneath it.
Why cheap commissions haven't moved the number that matters
A lower commission solves a restaurant's cost problem. It does nothing for a restaurant's customer-acquisition problem, and that second one is the harder half of the food delivery business to build from scratch. Swiggy and Zomato aren't dominant because their commissions are competitive — restaurant associations have been furious about those commissions for months. They're dominant because tens of millions of customers already have the apps installed, already trust the delivery-time estimates, and already default to opening them when they're hungry. A restaurant that gets a better commission rate from Flipkart or Ownly still needs someone to actually order from it there, and habit is a moat that a lower percentage point doesn't cross by itself.
That's the gap Flipkart is betting its existing scale can close where ONDC's smaller apps couldn't. Flipkart isn't launching food delivery cold — it's launching it in front of an app already on hundreds of millions of phones, with an existing logistics network and a payments stack already wired up for one-tap ordering. If a meaningful share of Flipkart's shopping traffic can be redirected toward food orders, it starts the customer-acquisition problem from a position ONDC's earlier entrants never had. Whether that redirection actually happens is the entire bet, and it's untested — Flipkart has no track record in perishable, time-sensitive delivery, a genuinely different operational problem from shipping a phone case.
What would make 10% not last
Rapido's Ownly is the cautionary comparison worth watching, because it tried the aggressive-pricing entry first and the commission war didn't dislodge the incumbents in five months. There's also a structural question neither ONDC-based challenger has had to answer yet: a 10% commission works if delivery, support and payment-processing costs can be covered by that 10% plus whatever else the platform earns elsewhere. Swiggy and Zomato's commissions sit where they do partly because food delivery on its own has historically struggled to turn a profit at a lower take rate — Swiggy's own quick-commerce arm, for comparison, has been posting losses in the hundreds of crores per quarter even at higher effective margins. If Flipkart's 10% turns out to be a customer-acquisition price rather than a sustainable one, restaurants who switch now should expect the number to move later, the way Ola and Uber's early India pricing did once the land grab was over.
For now, restaurants weighing whether to add Flipkart alongside Swiggy and Zomato are being offered a straightforwardly better commission with an unproven customer base behind it — against a proven customer base at a worse commission. Both of those are real trade-offs. Bengaluru's August 31 deadline will show whether enough restaurants decide the first one is worth testing.
