As urban markets saturate, ecommerce companies are increasingly looking to further spread into rural, semi-urban geographies to look for greener pastures. An attempt towards that is Flipkart’s latest introduction of user interfaces in three new local languages namely Tamil, Telegu and Kannada.
“This launch will help reduce the access barriers to e-commerce for native language speakers,” said Flipkart.
The company says this introduction is in line with Flipkart’s aim of developing state-of-the-art innovations to solve for the various pain points of consumers transitioning to e-commerce. These new interfaces have a mix of translations and transliteration of words. Over 5.4 million words were translated to help reduce the language barrier for users.
In India, e-commerce is yet to penetrate deep into its villages. Indian language internet users are expected to account for nearly 75 per cent of India’s internet user base by 2021. Both those factors coupled together will force most internet companies to introduce vernacular interfaces to attract those crowds.
Flipkart also recently introduced Hindi based interface nine months ago, as part of its efforts to make online commerce more inclusive and accessible for Indian language users.
Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Chief Executive Officer of Flipkart Group, said, “We truly believe that language if solved well, can be an opportunity rather than a barrier to reach millions of underserved consumers..”
Jeyandran Venugopal, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Flipkart said, “ Today, almost 58% of our user base comes from tier-II cities and beyond and with new language interfaces of Tamil, Telugu and Kannada along with Hindi will further improve users’ e-commerce journeys by making it simpler and more personal.”
