Mangalore-based Sushma Suvarna finds online buying convenient as she no longer has to take circuitous bus routes to and fro retail stores, even buying kitchen essentials or everyday household items. However, the Kannada-speaking 33-year-old was stymied while browsing e-commerce sites, since most of them featured English content.
Not anymore though.
Today, while searching for a dress for her 7-year-old daughter on shopping apps, she simply types her queries in her native language using English script or searches 7 Saal ki bacchi ka Lehnga. Et voila! She gets the desired results.
Sushma's story reflects the transformation underway in the e-commerce sector. In a bid to cater to large swathes of Indian consumers, leading e-commerce platforms are rolling out shopping experiences in multiple Indian languages. Amazon started this journey in 2018 by introducing Hindi on its platform and now also includes Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi and Bengali. Over 90 per cent of its customers using regional languages are from tier 2 and below cities.
Myntra, too, recorded significant growth in tier 2 cities and towns for online shopping, with 20 per cent of searches being non-English. Since launching vernacular search feature in April 2023, the company has reportedly noticed a marked improvement in customers finding precise results for their searches in native languages on the platform.
For Meesho, nearly 60 per cent of its orders come from tier 4+ cities and 70 per cent of customers from these regions prefer using vernacular languages. With around 11 million sellers and 100 million product listings, ensuring the discoverability of its wide product assortment in local languages like Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Odia was a no-brainer.
Utkrishta Kumar, CXO-business at Meesho, says that conversions on the platform have improved notably since the launch of vernacular languages. “Users are moving more quickly through the customer shopping journey. We saw a significant uptick in users moving from installing the application to placing the first order and placing regular orders (five orders and above),” he adds.
Be Indian, Speak Indian
It is unsurprising to see these ecommerce companies warm up to Indian languages. The country’s e-retail market, estimated to be $50 billion in 2022, is expected to scale up to $150-$170 billion by 2027, according to Bain & Company’s How India Shops Online 2022 report published in association with Flipkart. It found a 5X growth in voice-search users and 3X growth in vernacular-search users in 2021-22.
Part of this shift is due to changing post-pandemic dynamics in the world of online shopping. Deloitte’s ‘Know Your Customers’ report found that since 2020, the e-commerce sector in tier 2 and tier 3 cities has been steadily expanding. Younger and aspirational customers are joining the platforms from these regions, and they heavily lean on their native language while making their purchasing decisions.
Noticing this uptick for vernacular commerce, offline-to-online social commerce platform CoutLoot added Hindi language support last year. Following the addition, 39 per cent of its customers started using the feature in Hindi. The social commerce site supports 12 local languages for buyers and sellers with auto translation feature in the chat where users can also translate the chat in their local languages automatically based on location and preferences. It also created a separate collections section in the app to cater to the various demographic regions of the country after the platform found that customers from smaller towns tend to search for local products.
“84 per cent of our orders come from tier-2 and 3 cities,” says its co-founder Jasmeet Thind. Adding that India’s internet growth will be driven by non-English users, CoutLoot plans to add more regional language support.
E-commerce has already gained momentum among the urban population and is now gaining traction in smaller cities and towns. The customers in these places require a more discerned approach to pique their interest. To unlock their next phase of growth in the booming and diverse Indian market, e-commerce companies are betting big on localisation of content and communication.
Seeing Is Believing
In a diverse country like India which has over 20 official languages and over 6000 dialects, vernacular content is becoming the deal-clincher for the growing rural shopping community. However, the secret sauce is in devising differentiated strategies to tap this cohort rather than adopting a one-size-fits-all approach.
Himanshu Chakrawarti, CEO of Snapdeal, states that the site has minimal textual content and has a large focus on the visual medium. “So images are larger and more prominent, the text is minimised with very little text in easy-to-understand English and audio prompts wherever users get stuck,” he adds.
Thind states that English users in metros tend to rely on search while the wider audience prefers browsing things through a more visual interface, like videos.
“Hence, we added the seller story feature where sellers can upload videos of their products. This provides a good connection to the end user,” he says.
In the era of prolific short-form video content, social media, and connected technology, consumers are increasingly tuning into live and on-demand video. Video streaming is now dominating internet traffic. Live streaming has emerged as a newer niche for the creator economy to democratise monetisation for every content creator. A Coresight Research report stated that global live commerce sales are expected to reach $171 billion in 2023, up from $60 billion in 2019.
Another LocalCircles survey found that seven out of 10 Indians found live commerce for a product demo, terms of sale, returns, warranty, and pricing to be useful while making a purchase decision.
However, communication for live commerce needs to be customised—from targeted marketing to customer support—depending on the product category, target audience and marketing agenda. From context to imagery, characters and use of colloquial language, it is paramount to capture cultural nuances, which will make the brand communication impactful rather than getting lost in translation.
Meesho has observed that content that is high on visual appeal and adoption of vernacular languages is helping it break adoption barriers by busting myths and making the experience of transacting online more relatable.
To ride this wave of the e-commerce revolution, Amazon launched Live last year. On this live shopping program, content creators can showcase products, answer customer questions in real-time, run polls, and offer limited-duration deals.
Calling the platform beneficial for its vendors and shoppers, Kishore Thota, director-customer experience and marketing at Amazon India, says that it allows brands to have a deeper engagement that resonates with shoppers across India. Brands can leverage Amazon Live through two types of paid engagements.
One is brand-owned storefronts, which is the baseline engagement where brands can sign up as a partner on Amazon Live and run livestreams from their store fronts, just like any other creator. The other is sponsored content where Amazon will own execution of the livestreams. Brands can suggest the influencer, products to be showcased and creative suggestions for the livestream but Amazon will retain final decision on each of these.
“Encouraged by the adoption of Amazon Live by customers, we have increased the number of live streams to over 600 per month from 450 in 2022 with over 300 content creators participating actively. Amazon will continue to scale up Amazon Live program in India and is adding multiple touch points within the app to drive easier discoverability for customers,” Thota adds.
Other brands map their customer journey and create event-specific cohorts based on their location with specific actions on the platform. They also actively leverage user-generated content from YouTube videos and Instagram to reach their audience in smaller towns.
Advertising in local languages can be a resource-intensive exercise for brands. This is why many, like Meesho, engage with micro and nano influencers from smaller towns to connect with their regional audience and go hyper-local. This helps them connect with their consumers and establish trust, resulting in higher engagement and conversion rates.
“Partnering with regional influencers has helped us tailor our marketing campaigns to the local culture and preferences, making it more relatable to our target audience. The audience in these regions shows an increased preference for video content in the vernacular languages. Hence, 90% of the videos are in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali and Kannada. In the future, we plan to expand our outreach to include more regional languages,” Kumar adds.
This push for vernacular conversation is essential as brands jostle to get the mindshare of the same customer base. Cracking the localisation code will help them corner a major part of the market.
