Meesho strengthens regional foothold, adds 8 new vernacular languages to its platform
National,16 August 2022: Meesho, India’s fastest-growing internet commerce company, today announced the addition of eight new vernacular languages to its platform in line with its mission to democratize internet commerce for everyone. The move comes just ahead of the festive season, when millions of users from all corners of the country are expected to transact on the platform. These additional languages are Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Odia. Meesho customers can now select their preferred language for accessing account and product information, placing and tracking orders, making payments on Android phones.
Last year, Meesho introduced Hindi as a language option on the platform, which has seen a high adoption rate of 20% so far. Majority of Meesho customers come from tier 2+ cities like Ahmedabad, Vadodara & Jamshedpur and non-Hindi speaking states, where English or Hindi may not always be the language of choice. This latest initiative will boost Meesho’s adoption in these areas and further simplify online shopping experience for millions of customers.
To ensure an accurate and authentic experience in these new languages, Meesho derived key insights from user research and worked closely with expert linguists. The team chose commonly used words over full translation to mirror everyday language and make the shopping experience seamless. For example – literal translation for the word ‘required’ in Hindi is ‘anivarya’ but ‘zaroori’ is more widely understood. In total, around 33,000 English words were translated into each of these eight languages.
“It is important to note that ~50% of our users are new to e-commerce and have probably never transacted on such platforms before. By introducing vernacular languages on the platform, Meesho aims to eliminate language barriers. This is a natural step in our journey of becoming the single shopping destination for the next billion users in India. Our teams have worked tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure that the platform is 100% accurate and relevant in all these 8 vernacular languages,” said Sanjeev Barnwal, Founder & CTO, Meesho.
Recently, Meesho became India’s fastest e-commerce company to reach 100 million transacting users. Since March 2021, the transacting user base on the platform has surged ~5.5X while the assortment has grown 9X to ~72 million during the same period. Customers from tier 2+ markets have been key drivers of this growth, accounting for ~80% of all shoppers.