Amazon announced Bengali and Marathi as two new Indian languages ​​for shopping on its e-commerce site on Monday. With the new update, Amazon started supporting a total of seven Indian languages, namely Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. The American e-commerce giant also announced the addition of Hindi to its voice shopping experience which it launched last year in English. The new announcements arrive just ahead of shopping season in the country and days before Amazon’s Great Indian Festival sale kicks off.
By expanding support for the Indian language which received Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu last year, Amazon has made Bengali and Marathi the new regional languages ​​for customers shopping on its site. of electronic commerce. These languages ​​are available alongside English and aim to attract and support new customers.
Kishore Thota, Director of Customer Experience and Marketing at Amazon India, told Gadgets 360 that using existing Indian language support, more than five million customers purchased with Amazon in 2021 alone. He added that the languages ​​the company has added so far are spoken and used by more than 80% of Indian households.
“Our main focus is how to take advantage of the convenience of Amazon and all that it offers every Indian across the country, wherever they are, whatever their abilities or preferences,” said Thota in an interview.
The executive further said that over 65% of Amazon’s orders and 85% of its new customers were from level two geographies or below. Amazon aims to convert its repeat visitors to buyers by enabling Indian language support.
“When customers visit us multiple times and in a different language, let’s say their default language is English, so they can visit us multiple times. But once they switch languages, their immediate converting nature increases, so they become buyers much faster after switching languages. They also visit much more often, having changed their language to their preferred language, â€Thota said.
Users can switch to any of the Indian languages ​​by going to the Country and Language settings of the Amazon app or its website.
Late last year, the demand to add Marathi support to Amazon was raised by Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), creating controversy. The Seattle, Washington-based company promised at the time to support the language “soon.”
Thota suggested that controversy was not the reason the company appealed to Marathi.
“We launched four major South Indian languages ​​last year, and if we generally look at a language roadmap, Marathi and Bengali would likely be next,†he said. “So it was just a natural evolution of the introduction of new languages. “
Along with new Indian languages ​​for online shopping, Amazon is bringing Hindi support to its voice experience as an extension of the English part it introduced in March of last year. It will allow users to use their Hindi voice to search for products or check the status of their order.
The experience will always be limited to Android users because Amazon sees the dominance of Android over its customers. However, Thota said an iOS version of the voice shopping experience is in the works and will be released soon.
Amazon is also working to bring the experience to more Indian languages ​​over time.
“It’s an investment we make to understand and learn Hindi shopping,†Thota said.
Amazon claimed that customers using the English voice shopping experience increased twice year over year. However, he did not provide any details on the number of consumers purchasing products online using advanced experience.
In March, Amazon rival Flipkart introduced support for voice search in Hindi and English on its platform. Last year, the Walmart-owned company also launched Kannada, Tamil and Telugu in addition to English and Hindi to reach new customers in the country. We can certainly expect Flipkart to expand its language support with Bengali and Marathi in the coming days.
