NEW DELHI: Alphabet Inc’s Google is in talks with the Indian government to integrate its shopping services with the country’s open e-commerce network ONDC, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Late last month India soft-launched its Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) as the government tries to end thedominance of U.S. companies Amazon.com and Walmart in the fast-growing e-commerce market.

Google’s talks follow the success of its payments businessbecause of the government’s initiative for financial transactions, the Unified Payments Interface, said one of thesources, both of whom declined to be named as they were notauthorised to discuss the matter with the media.

Google’s existing shopping business works solely as anaggregator of listings online and doesn’t carry out any orderfulfilment like delivery, which the likes of Amazon do.

A Google spokesperson declined to comment on whether it was in talks with the government.

“We remain committed to focus on the enablement of small and medium businesses to leverage digital for deeper discovery and payments capabilities with Google Pay,” the spokesperson said, referring to its payments service.

Partners of the ONDC project, which currently includes thelikes of Indian fintech firm Paytm, will show listingsfrom each other on their platform in search results. Thegovernment’s aim is to level the playing field by reducing thecost of doing business for any seller who wants to list theirproducts online.

The ONDC programme aims to join 30 million sellers and 10million merchants online, and cover at least 100 cities andtowns by August.