Chikankari embroidery, made across artisan clusters in and around Lucknow, has been sold to buyers well beyond Uttar Pradesh for generations, but most of that trade still moves through middlemen and marketplace listings that take a heavy commission on thin artisan margins. ONDC, the Open Network for Digital Commerce, was explicitly built to give MSMEs, artisans, and small sellers a lower-cost route to a wider market: a DPIIT-backed non-profit modelled on UPI, it 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.
Uttar Pradesh's own digital-commerce push has added momentum, with the state government actively encouraging MSME onboarding to ONDC. For Lucknow's artisan brands and small manufacturers, that combination, a lower-commission network plus state-level support, is a genuine opportunity, provided the storefront itself is built for Hindi-speaking sellers and customers on shared family devices, not translated from an English-first template.
Akoode builds in-house with no subcontracting, and every quote for a Lucknow client is scoped and billed in rupees with GST, with Hindi interfaces and DPDP-aware data handling built in from day one.
