Retail

Amazon India starts small pilot for mobile site in Hindi


BENGALURU: As ecommerce companies look to onboard the next wave of online shoppers, Amazon India has started experimenting with a Hindi interface for its mobile website, its first move in vernacular languages. Amazon has launched a small pilot wherein the interface features text in Hindi, the company said.

Till now, Amazon and its main rival Flipkart have kept their interface in English, but that has started to change as these companies started targeting new users beyond the first 100-150 million in India. Amazon India head Amit Agarwal had told ET that the company’s vision for the next five years was to target the next 100 million ecommerce 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 said.

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.

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.

In an interview given to ET in June 2017, Amazon India head Amit Agarwal had also indicated that the company was working towards the discontinuity created by language barrier. The focus for the e-tailer has been first to provide customer support in vernacular language, which accounts for half of such calls for it.

“How will you help people who are not very well versed with English, how will they shop? Indians are very well versed in buying but when they want service, they want to talk in the language they know,” said Agarwal during the interaction.

While the major ecommerce platforms have only had an interface in English, Snapdeal had started offering multilingual interface on its mobile app in 2015.

However, the impact of internet penetration with the popularity of Jio could see more ecommerce companies looking to reach the new internet users through local languages, according to experts.

“Some ecommerce companies had tried multilingual interface some years ago, but it did not have a big impact then. With Jio’s penetration, multilingual interface could have some impact,” said Rahul Chowdhri, Stellaris Venture Partners. “However, language is only part of the interface and the user interface as a whole may have to be tweaked to suit the next online shoppers,” he said.

Chowdhri said the next experiments ecommerce companies could do for the first-time shoppers could be around adding voice to search, making the interface more visual and “doing away with concepts such as a shopping cart.”

Flipkart recently acquired Liv.ai, which converts local language speech to text, and is expected to integrate voice in the next 6-8 months.





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