It is always nice and way easier to understand things when read or said in the native language. To make shoppers feel more convenient and comfortable while shopping online, Flipkart has added support for three new Indian native languages – Tamil, Telugu and Kannada. These come over nine-months after the Walmart-owned e-commerce company added support for Hindi on its store.
The new Indian regional language interface is built on Flipkart’s ‘Localization and Translation Platform’. Its main goal is to empower customers to confidently do any task on its e-commerce store (like searching for a product, reading details about a product, reading reviews, buying the product, contacting customer care etc) in their local language, with ease.
Flipkart’s tech team has conducted an ethnographic study across cities including Salem, Visakhapatnam and Mysore, over several months. This helped the team to gather relevant insights on users distinctive language behaviour across these regions.
This new language interface uses a judicious mix of translated and transliteration of words, thus making shopping on Flipkart more engaging. The team has translated over 5.4 million words across product specifications, banners and payment pages etc., in the three languages.
Flipkart said that it decided to go with Tamil, Telugu and Kannada, because of the growing user base from this Southern states coupled with a higher adoption rate of native language script. These users are primarily from smaller towns, and providing native language support offers a more personalised experience. It would also make e-commerce more inclusive.
How to change the language in Flipkart app
You could easily change Flipkart store language from English to Hindi, Tamil, Telugu or Kannada and vice versa.
- Under the Flipkart mobile app, tap the menu (the three-bar icon).
- Under the menu section, select “Choose Language”.
- From there you could choose between English (default), Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada.
- Once set, the whole Flipkart shopping experience will be in your chosen language.
“Today, almost 58% of our user base comes from tier-II cities and beyond and with new language interfaces of Tamil, Telugu and Kannada along with Hindi (introduced last year) will further improve users’ e-commerce journeys by making it simpler and more personal“, commented Jeyandran Venugopal, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Flipkart.
If you can read any of these new native languages, then you could set/change them directly on Flipkart mobile app. Yes, this native language integration is initially limited to Flipkart mobile app (both Android and iOS versions).