Flipkart has today announced that its e-commerce marketplace is now available in three new languages. The company has revealed that the e-commerce platform will be available in Tamil, Telugu and Kannada languages.
To recall, the company introduced Hindi interface for its platform last year. The introduction of 3 vernacular interfaces, is in line with Flipkart’s aim of developing innovations to solve for the various pain points of consumers transitioning to e-commerce.
As per research, Southern states account for a significant proportion of Flipkart’s growing user base coupled with a higher adoption rate of native language script, regional language interfaces. The new language interfaces use a mix of translated and transliteration of words to make shopping more engaging for consumers. This follows an ethnographic study that was conducted over several months to get relevant insights that helped the team develop a platform that enables consumers to interact with the platform in their own language and encourage independence in purchase decisions.
The ethnography study involving meetings with participants across cities including Salem, Visakhapatnam and Mysore helped gather insights about consumers’ distinctive language behaviour across these regions and brought forward interesting insights to be implemented. This included a large scale translation of over 5.4 million words across product specifications, banners and payment pages etc., in the three languages.
Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Chief Executive Officer of Flipkart Group, said, “In the past year, we have introduced multiple solutions under Voice, Video and Vernacular to increase ecommerce adoption for millions of consumers. We truly believe that language, if solved well, can be an opportunity rather than a barrier to reach millions of consumers who have been underserved. As a homegrown e-commerce marketplace, we understand India and its diversity in a more nuanced way and are building products that have the potential to bring a long-term change. The introduction of Tamil, Telugu and Kannada interfaces, in addition to Hindi & English, is a meaningful step in that direction in line with our mission to democratize ecommerce in India.”