Snapdeal bets big on vernacular interface as it gears up for festive season

Snapdeal, one of India’s leading value-focused e-commerce platform, has seen 30 percent of its users prefer the vernacular language interface that it provides on the platform.
In addition to English, Snapdeal’s app is now available in eight Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Gujarati, Punjabi, and Marathi.
The Snapdeal app and m-site were launched in vernacular languages to a select number of users about six months ago. After testing the pilot roll-out, the vernacular options are now being expanded to a larger audience ahead of the Diwali season. This is in response to the growing number of users from smaller cities who prefer the comfort of browsing in their native languages.
“While e-commerce in India is about a decade old, the early buyers were mainly an English-speaking audience from metro India. Over the last few years, with the steady fall in the price of smartphones and data, buyers from all parts of India are coming online in massive waves. The next 400 million online buyers will be very diverse in terms of languages spoken. They are now starting to explore and buy from the vast choices available online. As a discovery-led platform, we are delighted to offer our users the option to browse and transact on Snapdeal using multiple Indian languages. We believe this will make shopping more fun and convenient for our customers,” said Snapdeal spokesperson.
Snapdeal has seen a higher engagement on its platform from users utilizing the vernacular option. The higher engagement has been in terms of increased page views, time spent on the platform, interaction with various features like gaming and product videos, and purchases made. Snapdeal has added 5 million new shoppers on its platform amid the pandemic. Three in four of these new shoppers have accessed the platform in vernacular language.
Among the vernacular shoppers, the Hindi language is the most used interface on the app. Most of the shoppers using the Hindi language app come from Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, and Delhi NCR. Some of the other languages that have been used frequently include Tamil and Telugu. Nearly 96 percent of vernacular language users were from non-metros.
The vernacular language tech has largely been built in-house by Snapdeal.