Snapdeal shifting to multi-lingual platform to accelerate growth in hinterland

BANGALORE: Online retail marketplace Snapdeal, which gets more than half its sales from smaller cities and towns, is shifting to a multi-lingual platform to accelerate its growth in the hinterland. Customers can now access the site in Hindi or Tamil, apart from English.

This move makes Snapdeal the first large multi-category online retailer to have the regional language option. Its competitor, Flipkart said it was not considering such a move just yet.

Multi-category retailers have been stepping up their game over the past year in anticipation of Amazon’s entry into India. The largest online retailer in the world entered the country about six months ago selling books, but has since expanded into 15 categories.

Besides turning multi-lingual, the four-year-old company has launched a payment gateway that allows users to save credit-card details.

A similar technology was introduced introduced by Flipkart as well, which is now available to other online sites, including MakeMyTrip. “We are targeting ‘middle India’— customers who are price and value conscious, many of whom reside in non-metros and prefer to access online content in their local language,” said Ankit Khanna, vice president of product management at Snapdeal. “Our aim is to make our customers’ transaction experience as comfortable as possible.”

More than one-third of internet users in India accessed content in local languages, according to an Internet and Mobile Association of India study last year. “In India, English is not enough to reach all parts and strata,” said Arvind Singhal, chairman of advisory firm Technopak. “Local language sites will significantly expand the market.”

This is not the first time that an online retailer has gone regional. In 2012, web-only brand Yepme introduced Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil options, but reversed the move due to poor customer adoption.