SoftBank-backed Meesho adds 8 Indian languages to tap more users

Social commerce platform seeks to widen reach during festival season in the country

Meesho, the SoftBank-backed social commerce platform, said on Wednesday it is adding eight new Indian languages to its platform as it seeks new users during the festival season.

Meesho customers can now use Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Odia for accessing accounts, product information, placing and tracking orders, and making payments on Android phones.

"About 50 per cent of our users are new to e-commerce and have probably never transacted on such platforms before,” said Sanjeev Barnwal, founder and chief technology officer or Meesho. “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.”

Meesho last year introduced Hindi as a language option, recording an adoption rate of 20 per cent since then. A majority of Meesho customers come from tier-two cities like Ahmedabad, Vadodara and Jamshedpur, and non-Hindi-speaking states.

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 the everyday language and make the shopping experience seamless.

Meesho this year 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 more than six-fold.