Chennai's silk, textile, and handicraft exporters, concentrated around T. Nagar and Kanchipuram, have sold internationally for generations, and moving that trade online means getting multi-currency pricing, export documentation, and product photography accurate enough that a buyer in another country trusts what they're ordering sight unseen. Chennai's SaaS and product engineering ecosystem, meanwhile, is where a lot of the backend tooling behind Indian commerce platforms actually gets built.
ONDC has real relevance for Chennai's smaller exporters and D2C sellers specifically. The Open Network for Digital Commerce, a DPIIT-backed non-profit modelled on UPI, had crossed 200 million cumulative transactions and over 760,000 onboarded sellers nationally by early 2026, at commissions around 1 to 3 percent against 25 to 30 percent on closed marketplaces, a meaningful difference for a business selling handmade goods on thin margins.
Akoode builds in-house with no subcontracting, and every quote for a Chennai client is scoped and billed in rupees with GST, with DPDP obligations mapped into checkout and customer-data architecture from day one, and infrastructure disaster-recovery tested ahead of monsoon season every year.
