Flipkart includes Bengali and Odia, says move helps 'democratise ecommerce'

Flipkart said it has now expanded to seven Indian languages spoken by nearly 75 per cent of India's population.

Flipkart’s app will have Bengali and Odia to make e-commerce inclusive and accessible to Indian language users, said the company on Wednesday.

Flipkart said it has expanded to seven Indian languages spoken by nearly 75 per cent of India’s population. Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Marathi were included in a span of 1.5 years.

“Flipkart is committed to bringing the next 200 million customers online by bringing state-of-the-art technological solutions to democratize e-commerce in India,” said Rajneesh Kumar, chief corporate affairs officer at Flipkart. 

“With Bengali and Odia, we are further doubling down on our efforts and making deep investments in technology to bring a natural language experience to millions of our customers across the country,” said Kumar.

Flipkart said that its vernacular platform is witnessing an impressive adoption across the country. According to usage trends, over 95 per cent of the customers who opted for a vernacular language experience continued with the same, showcasing customers’ acceptance of these capabilities.

According to industry reports, Indian language internet users will account for nearly 75 per cent of the country’s internet user base by end of 2021. This growing base of users, primarily from smaller towns, makes it extremely important to enable e-commerce in regional languages to offer a more personalised experience.