A particular VC has been asking me for a very long time, “Mahesh, what is your take on ecommerce in Indic? Will Indian internet users accept an Indian language ecommerce site?”. I have been giving him my views but I did not have any data to back.
I decided to conduct a poll and ask Oneindia’s Tamil users directly about their preference. About 11,000 responded to our query, the findings of which are as follows,
Most of the Tamilians are ready welcome e-commerce in Tamil. While 40% conveyed positive response towards the idea of bringing e-commerce in Tamil, only 17% showed their reliance in English.
There are many ways to analyze these findings – ONLY 40% will transact on a language ecom site, about 43% are not having a particular preference for English or language. That’s fine. The way I see it – good to see the language users making their presence felt, good to see they have an opinion, good to see they have a “wish list”.
Just today we read about Facebook adding Indic support to their mobile app, there must be a valid reason for a giant like Facebook to go the “mobile Indic” way.
Majority of the new internet users in India (between 2012 and 2015) are expected to more comfortable with their mother tongue than English. Time for all internet entrepreneurs to think the Indic way, ecom+Indic way, wait may be even the ecom+Indic+mobile way!
At http://www.chennaishopping.com, we do that.