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