It’s the flavour of the season. Companies are rushing a grab a foothold in small town India, and are adapting their English interfaces to suit the average Indian consumer. After Snapdeal and Quikr had gone desi and made their apps available in local languages, Paytm has now added a Hindi interface to its seller app to increase its appeal in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.
The move is particularly important for Paytm as it attempts to make its app widely used across India. “We want to make sure that our app isn’t just used for large transactions, but lots of small transactions”, says founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma. Paytm has been introducing its online payment option at everything ranging from paanwalas to petrol pumps to get more users to transfer money digitally.
“The top-10 cities of seller-app usage include metros as well as cities like Ahmedabad, Surat, Jaipur and others. These sellers usually deal in unstructured categories such as fashion, home and lifestyle products, and the demand to develop a local-language interface has come from the seller meetings,” said Sudhanshu Gupta, vice-president of business at Paytm. The Hindi interface launched two weeks ago has seen an increase in engagement time and number of active users on the app. The company plans to add more languages to its app going forward.
Flipkart, Snapdeal and Paytm currently run variants of the marketplace model and are vying to get as many merchants as possible on their platforms.