It’s no secret that Amazon loves India. The company has been in the country for over 7 years now, and has became a cultural phenomena within the proliferating Internet market of the country. Financially too, the Jeff Bezos led ecommerce giant is heavily invested in the country.
Further doubling down on its India venture and in an effort to go deeper into India’s smaller cities, Amazon is rolling out support for regional languages from the south of India — Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu on its platform. And no, this is obviously not because Flipkart has also rolled out support for Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada.
Nonetheless, whatever the reason, the company has finally decided to reach out to local markets in the country, and added support for languages that will help it reach an additional 200-300 million users. Moreover, this is the perfect time for a move like this, since festival season is about to start in the country. Thus, Amazon wants to use this opportunity and make the most out of it, and a larger user base will go a long way towards achieving that goal.
The company added support for Hindi 2 years ago, which was rolled out for both its website and apps. This move, according to Amazon, has helped it reach a much wider audience in the country, with the company noting that the usage of Hindi has grown by three times in the past five months. In fact, Amazon says that “hundreds of thousands” of Amazon customers have switched to Hindi shopping experience.
This new announcement will help Amazon reach an entirely new geographic, since many of the people that speak any of these languages (Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu) don’t generally speak Hindi.
Walmart backed Flipkart also announced support for Kannada, Tamil and Telugu, a move which will help it reach 200 million new users in the country. Thus, Amazon has decided to follow the path set by its rival to a t, going as far as using a similar set of expert linguists to develop an accurate and comprehensible experience in each of the languages.
Moreover, the company also ensures that the support for these new languages will be more than a mere translation, as it will prefer using commonly used terms from daily life over perfectly translated words, along with other optimizations.
