While researching on e-commerce in other countries, I realized that ecommerce sites in almost all the countries are in their local language where as in India all the major e-commerce sites are in English only.
It made me wonder whether there is a market for e-commerce companies to have presence in Hindi to attract customers who are more comfortable with Hindi and might like to read more about the product in Hindi before buying it. I asked the question to my friends and almost everybody was of the view that there is negligible or no market for Hindi website.
Curious, I decided to research about the audience for Hindi content on the net. I was surprised to find that Dainikbhaskar.com, a Hindi news website, has an Alexa rank of 69 and way ahead of Hindu at 133 Alexa rank and Hindustantimes.com which has an Alexa rank of 142.
One of the major benefit outline by e-commerce is to make several products available to small cities and towns where brick and mortar store may not be stocking those products. The long term growth is bound to come from these cities. It makes sense for the e-commerce companies to work on making sites available in Hindi/regional language to bring in customers who have working knowledge of English but more comfortable in Hindi/local language.
The article first published at www.ecommerceadda.com
