Friday, August 3, 2018

E- COMMERCE SPECIAL .........The Language Opportunity

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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