 "Snapdeal goes multilingual")
In a first for Indian e-commerce, Snapdeal will be available in 12 languages to online shoppers. The mobile site will be available in Hindi and Telugu immediately, the firm announced on Tuesday.
By January 26, the website will come in 11 languages including Gujarati, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali and Punjabi, besides English.
E-commerce companies riding on the exponential growth of mobile internet have realised they need to develop a language tool to target the regional markets, which will be where most of the revenues will be generated.
With this move, the Delhi-based e-commerce company expects to expand its reach to an additional 130 million smart phone users in India.
“India’s linguistic diversity is a huge opportunity to expand the market to include those users who would prefer to engage in their native languages. Our decision to go multi-lingual is driven by the feedback we have received from our users. We are sure this will enable millions of new users to join the digital commerce revolution that is sweeping across India. Snapdeal’s multi-lingual platform will redefine the rules of the game and will allow sellers and buyers from all across India to explore and transact without any constraints of language,” said Rohit Bansal, co-founder at Snapdeal.
The multilingual platform is built on top of Snaplite, Snapdeal’s website for mobile browser.
Sources said the company developed a tool in Bengaluru where a team worked around English as the base language and then used translation, transliteration and a grammar angel to maintain the nuances of the languages. The brand names, however, will remain untouched.
