US-based e-commerce giant Amazon has launched the Hindi version of its mobile website and app for its new customers based in smaller cities. It was earlier reported that Amazon was testing mobile website in Hindi, to target vernacular customers.
According to Amazon executives, the website is now available in five international languages, including English and Hindi.
“Of the 400-odd million Internet users in India, more than 100 Mn Internet users prefer to shop in Hindi, interact with Hindi language websites. Close to 65% of them are from the smaller cities who want to make an online purchase for the first time. We believe that Amazon.in in Hindi is a critical step to address these users,” Amazon India vice-president (category management) Manish Tiwary, said.
Amazon is boosting its efforts to target the first time buyers by enhancing and simplifying their shopping experience by focusing on generating local language driven content for its customers.
The e-commerce giant has more than 180 million products from around 380,000 sellers on its platform. It is looking to translate all the product details in Hindi to further provide a complete shopping experience for its customers. It claims to have already hired people with domain and language expertise to help it translate the product details.
If the Hindi website and app proves to be successful, the company will be looking to further strengthen its vernacular game by introducing local language support to target the growing local language e-commerce customers owing to mobile penetration in the country.
While Amazon’s Hindi website for mobile users is already live, its rival Flipkart is not far behind. Last month, Flipkart acquired AI-powered speech recognition startup Liv.ai, to penetrate into the tier 2 cities.
According to a study by KPMG and Google in April 2017, titled ‘Indian Languages – Defining India’s Internet’, Indian language internet users have grown at a CAGR of 41% to reach 234 million in 2016 from merely 42 million users in 2011. This number is further expected to grow at a CAGR of 18% to reach 536 million Indian language users by 2021. While English language users in India are expected to grow at 3% CAGR to reach 199 million by 2021.
Owing to the rise of Indian language users in the country, many Indian startups have started focusing on the new generation of online users from smaller cities. As these vernacular language users come online for the first time, creating new opportunities, no one would want to be left behind in leveraging the opportunity.