E - COMMERCE The Language Opportunity
India’s small
towns and cities collectively represent a mega-sized but tough-to-access market
for online retailers. How small ecommerce firms are trying to seize the
opportunity by speaking in local languages
A new breed of social ecommerce and recommerce companies are looking
to digitally recreate the experience of bargaining with vendors in the lanes of
Bengaluru’s Commercial Street or the streets of Delhi’s Sarojini Market—in
local languages.
About 75% of Indian internet users
are expected to be regional language speakers by 2021, as per industry
estimates. To reach this demographic, companies including Helion
Ventures-backed Wooplr and Beenext-backed Elanic are working on launching
platforms in vernacular languages including Hindi, Telugu and Tamil so sellers
and buyers can engage better.
Social commerce platform Wooplr is
running a beta version of its user interface with eight languages for users
from over 250 towns, and has noticed a 40% increase in engagement and
conversion. The Bengaluruheadquartered company is doing this to ensure trust
and ease of conversation as a large portion of its sellers and customers are
non-English speakers.
Similarly, fashion marketplace
Elanic, which mostly has unbranded sellers on its platform, plans to launch a
user interface in Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi and Bengali and a chat option for
sellers and buyers to communicate. At least half of Elanic’s sellers do not
speak English.
“We will map ecommerce use cases
that could be around price negotiation, more product details, delivery date,
etc., and launch that in the next 6 months,” said cofounder Palkush Rai Chawla.
“The customer can choose a phrase in, say, Hindi and it will be displayed in a
language the seller (understands).”
The company plans to use
thirdparty natural language processing (NLP) technologies for this purpose.
“There are a lot of NLP engines for vernacular that can understand context,
correct spelling mistakes, translate, cross-translate,” he said.
India’s ecommerce market size is
estimated to be over $20 billion, growing at 25-26% in metro areas and at about
32% in non-metro regions, as per industry estimates.
India’s local language internet
user base increased at a compound annual growth rate of 41% between 2011 and
2016 to 234 million users, according to a study by KPMG India and Google last
year. This user base is forecast to grow to 536 million by 2021, as compared to
the Englishspeaking internet user base that is pegged to grow at 3% CAGR to
reach 199 million users over the next three years.
“(Vernacular language) is where
the next wave of growth will come from and it’s natural for companies to tap
into that. Five years from now, no company can be at scale without having a
vernacular play,” said Bejul Somaia, managing director at Lightspeed India,
which has invested in vernacular language social media platform ShareChat.
Ecommerce giants Flipkart and
Amazon India, too, which began their journey with targeting metro cities and
English-speaking buyers, have started focusing on tier 2 and smaller markets to
capture the next 300 million users. The companies are tapping into these
markets through an expansive catalogue of products and affordability
constructs, and not by adopting local languages yet.
Industry players and experts
believe that re-cataloging of products in vernacular languages is a massive
challenge and a major cost for established ecommerce companies. Even Paytm
Mall’s platform, whose user interface is available in several vernacular
languages, has a lot of its product listings in English.
The KPMG-Google study reported
that around 44% of Indianlanguage users find it difficult to comprehend product
description and customer reviews on ecommerce platforms.
“High involvement categories like
fashion and lifestyle need to invest in product description and user reviews in
Indian languages,” the report stated. “Over 50% of offline shoppers are willing
to access e-tailing websites if provided with end-to-end Indian language
interface.”
But this makes for an expensive
proposition. Experts peg the cost of creating content for each product to be at
least Rs 100.
“I don’t think it’s the lack of
intent for established players but more about the enormity of the task of
reproducing everything into multiple languages that demands high cost and
resources,” said Anup Jain, managing partner at Orios Venture Partners. “The
first generation of startups in India began with focusing on English-speaking
users and will now have to diversify to reach the next wave of internet users who
are eager to use the internet but are hampered by language.”
Accel Partners-backed Glowroad is
seeking to ease product discovery and communication for customers by using
local languages. “We are thinking of launching a forum of sorts and are also
looking at launching ecommerce content in Hindi,” said Kunal Sinha, cofounder
of the one-year-old GlowRoad. “We have seen demand from customers. They usually
type out in English script but the language is Hindi. So we want to make it
easier for them by launching local languages on the platform.”
Sequoia-backed social commerce
platform Meesho, which has its seller base across 500 cities, is also looking
to launch an interface in vernacular languages in a few months.
“We have noticed how some of the
social media startups in local languages have scaled up and (we) have been
thinking about rolling out some vernacular languages on our app in the next few
quarters,” said chief executive of Meesho, Vidit Aatrey. “For now, we have some
seller onboarding content (videos) in both English and Hindi and we have seen
high engagement in Hindi.”
Vernacular social media platforms
like SAIF Partners and Xiaomi backed ShareChat and Mooshak have been able to
scaleup at an exponential rate to set an example on how imperative a local language
play is in India. Sharechat, which is the largest non-English social media
platform in the country, has around 20 million daily users interacting in 14
vernacular languages.
But even as ecommerce companies
seek to tap this potentially huge market, experts believe it may not be as easy
for them as it has been for content platforms. “The economics for an ecommerce
company in this space (vernacular) will be tough as opposed to a social media
platform, which can scale at a lower cost,” said Somaia of Lightspeed India.
Varsha.Bansal@timesgroup.com
ET 20JUL18
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