The language of market expansion

If round one of the competition in e-commerce rested on deep discounts, the next one could well be on getting the language right

So it took an American company to introduce online shopping in vernacular languages, starting with Hindi. Amazon, which entered India five years ago, realised the only way to make it big in this country is through going local, and it has made a beginning. But there’s a side story which may just get bigger.

Remember the promo that Amazon launched sometime in 2016 around “apni dukaan”? The promo was meant to reach out to buyers across cities and towns — both big and small, urban and rural. As the company famously points out, around 99.7 per cent pin codes of the country have placed order with Amazon at least once. Apni dukaan clearly aimed to take the number to 100 per cent and make it multiple orders from every pin code. Now, with vernacular being the flavour of the season, the spirit of apni dukaan has been revived. Jeff Bezos, in his congratulatory message to all employees when the company turned five, called Amazon.in “India ki apni dukaan” to drive home the point.

It’s indeed catchy for an American major to sell the online dream to millions of non-English speaking audience through apni dukaan. But here’s the side story. Back in 2007, when two IIT graduates in their mid-20s, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal (not related to each other), were setting up Flipkart in Bengaluru, two Pune-based brothers also of the same age, Ravi Jain and Kamal Jain, became the proud owners of apnidukaan.com— a domain name registered for an e-commerce site. A decade later, Jains have woken up to the real potential of the site that they have trademark rights over.

There’s been a buzz that Amazon may like to buy the domain name from the Jains as apnidukaan would have a good resonance in rural areas. But after back channel talks through proxies, it seems there’s been no settlement on price yet. Ravi Jain, now 37, refused to get drawn into the controversy of domain name. There’s no concrete proposal from anybody, is all he would say. He admits however that his business (on the apnidukaan platform) grew several times over following the Amazon promo. Yes, he’s aware of Amazon’s vernacular push, built on the apni dukaan marketing campaign, and expects the traffic to go through the roof.

The Jain brothers have never met the Bansals, but it’s some coincidence that four men of the same age group but very different background were thinking of starting up in a similar space at the same time. Ravi Jain, who runs the show, says online shopping was very new in 2007, explaining why he set up the site and kept it alive. Giving the narrative an Indian twist, Jain says he wants apnidukaan (his marketplace site) to host small retailers who are not encouraged by multinationals. Now is the real time to enter Indian online retail, he declares. 

Ravi Jain may or may not be waiting for a tryst with fortune, but vernacular is a bet that is unlikely to fail. Tejesh Srivastav, a consultant in the e-commerce space, refers to China’s robust local language internet to explain the point. Baidu, Sina Weibo, Tmall and Dangdang are all local language platforms in China for search, social media and e-commerce. Trying the same things — discounts and bigger discounts — is not enough, he believes. Throw away the old model, build a new one for the India market, he suggests to the likes of Amazon, Walmart and Alibaba.

A study by KPMG (India) and Google last year predicted that nine out of every 10 new internet users in India over the next five years are likely to be Indian language users. As of last year, there were 234 million Indian language internet users compared to 175 million English internet users. There’s more. Indian language internet users are expected to grow at a CAGR of 18 per cent to reach 536 million in 2021. In contrast, English users would possibly grow at just 3 per cent. The growth in Indian language internet users is real. According to available data, the numbers rose from 42 million in 2011 to 234 million by end of 2016. 

It’s no surprise then that Amazon has begun the vernacular drive, possibly to be replicated by others including rival Walmart that is starting its India innings in e-commerce after buying a majority stake in Flipkart for $16 billion. If round one of the competition was on deep discounts, the next one could well be on getting the language right. Apni dukaan or apnidukaan could possibly stir things up.