In a move to onboard the next generation of online users from the tier 2 & 3 cities, Amazon India has started experimenting with a Hindi interface for its mobile website.
According to a Google and KPMG report in April 2017, English language users in India are expected to reach around 200 million, while Indian language users are expected to reach around 536 million by 2021.
As most of the online Indian language users are expected to be using smartphones to access the internet, owing to the mobile penetration in India, Amazon has started to test its mobile website in Hindi to help these customers.
“We work backwards from our customer needs and continuously explore and experiment with new ways of making the shopping experience convenient and easy for customers in India. As part of that, we have started piloting the Amazon.in shopping experience in Hindi,” a company spokesperson was quoted as saying.
Earlier this month, Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart acquired AI-powered speech recognition startup Liv.ai, to target customers from tier 2 cities.
Vernacular users are only going to increase as more users from rural India come online. E-commerce websites are looking to target these users to help them in their online shopping experience.
Many more Indian startups are expected to support Indic languages on their interface to accommodate the growing vernacular users in the country.
A report by IAMAI and Kantar IMRB earlier this year showed that of the 481 million internet users in the country, 70% consumed Indic content. It showed that 76% of internet users in rural India had Indic usage, while the proportion was 66% in urban India.
Recently, Amazon Pay, Amazon’s digital payment platform had acquired “all-in-one” multi-service app Tapzo, in order to strengthen its digital payments platform, as it competes it payment giants like Paytm and Flipkart-backed PhonePe.