NEW DELHI: Indian consumers who shy away from shopping on e-commerce sites due to language barriers are likely to get some relief as Amazon, one of India’s largest e-commerce players, on Tuesday launched a Hindi version of its mobile website and app for Android smartphones.
“The launch of Hindi shopping experience is a significant step towards bringing the next 100 million customers online. This first Indian language launch will enable crores of Hindi-preferring customers across India to shop in the language of their liking,” said Manish Tiwary, vice-president (category management), Amazon India. The service is currently available on Android OS and the mobile website, and will soon be available on Apple devices and desktops.
Most features of the Hindi version of Amazon.in website are similar to its English website. The translation of its English content into Hindi has been achieved combining human effort and artificial intelligence, and customers will be able to read detailed product information, find deals and discounts, track their orders in Hindi.
Amazon also has plans to offer its services in other local languages as Internet proliferation among non-English speaking population in the country is expected to grow. According to a 2017 report by KPMG and Google, users of Indian languages are expected to reach 536 million by 2021, while English users will be around 199 million. The report said nine out of ten new Internet users between 2016 and 2021 would use local languages.
India’s e-commerce market, which is currently over $38 billion in size, is tipped to grow to $150 billion by 2022, according to a report by Nasscom and PwC.
At present, the two other leading e-commerce players , Flipkart and Paytm, do not have the local language version of their apps or websites. Snapdeal, which was once a major force in e-com space, did launch a mobile website in Hindi and Telugu in 2015 and conducted pilot runs for 12 regional languages, but stopped after six months. Flipkart, which recently acquired AI-led speech recognition Liv.ai, is also planning to come up with a similar feature.