As more and more Indians begin shopping online via smartphones in tier II and III cities, Amazon India on Tuesday launched a Hindi version of its mobile website and app for Android devices, aiming to bring the next 100 million customers online.

At the moment, only the mobile website and app on Android -- not the desktop version -- have Hindi support.

The Hindi version of 'Amazon.in' on mobile phones will enable shoppers read product information, find deals and discounts, place the orders, pay for their orders, manage their account information, track their orders and view order history in Hindi.

"Launch of the Hindi shopping experience is a significant step towards bringing the next 100 million customers online," Amazon India Vice President (Category Management) Manish Tiwary said in a statement.

"This first Indian language launch will enable crores of Hindi-preferring customers across India to shop in their preferred language," Tiwary added.

Customers opting for the Hindi shopping experience can select their language option from the menu in the top left corner on their smartphones.

They will always have the choice to change their language preference any time, the US-based online retailer said.

However, customers will continue to have the search feature in English and will also need to enter delivery addresses in English.

"The upcoming festival season is a great time for new customers to come online to fulfil their shopping needs - now for the first time customers can do their Diwali shopping in Hindi!" Tiwary said.

The team will continue to evolve the experience to add more shopping features like product reviews, ratings, questions and answers available in Hindi over the next few months, Amazon India said in the statement.

"Getting Indian languages right in a shopping context is hard but an interesting opportunity," said Kishore Thota, Amazon India Director (Customer Experience and Marketing).

"We combined both human effort to craft the right experience and artificial intelligence to scale this experience across the vast selection available at Amazon. We are just getting started, look to learning and getting better," he added.

The Amazon team, consisting of language experts and translators, chose commonly used terms over perfectly translated words to make the shopping experience easily understandable and seamless for Hindi customers.

First Published:Sept 5, 2018 5:34 AM IST