Why should Indian payment gateways be only in English? CCAvenue goes Vernacular

Only one in ten of the over 1 billion Indians reads English. But the country has 200+ million internet users out of which 100 million are active. That Indian internet companies need to engage the non-English speaking population in order to grow, it's imperative to overcome the digital divide and enable rural India through customized benefits.

You don’t need a crystal ball to predict that the future of Internet in India is mobile and vernacular. The mobile-first internet growth will be inclusive of more rural & more women. A few digital players are launching their services in vernacular languages to expand their market. In November 2014, MakeMyTrip launched their mobile app in Gujarati, Tamil and Telegu. Snapdeal and Myntra have also rolled out multi-lingual websites to allow shopping for their products and services in more and more local languages.

In a similar bid, the renowned payment gateway provider CCAvenue has launched its Hindi, Marathi Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Punjabi. CCAvenue’s Multilingual Checkout Page will help merchants deliver a "localized" shopping and payments experience and reach out to all sections of consumers.

While e-commerce players fight a war of reaching out more users. And as lot of traction coming from tier II and III cities via mobile, payment gateways want their pie.

Speaking at the launch of this feature, Mr. Vishwas Patel, CEO of CCAvenue said “At CCAvenue, we pride ourselves on offering products and solutions that are innovative, relevant and set new standards in customer/user experience. With the launch of our CCAvenue’s multilingual checkout/payments page combined with our capability to process transactions in 27 currencies, it will certainly empower our merchants to deliver a seamless and a truly localized shopping and payments experience to their global customers. Just imagine a tamilian Indian is able to do the entire payments in tamil and pay in the indian rupee or a French national be able to do the entire transaction in French and pay in EURO. That’s a truly localized experience; our merchants can today deliver on a global scale, sitting out here in India, through our CCAvenue Payment Gateway”.

In 2013 NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India) authorized CCAvenue to process RuPay Debit Cards on India's first-ever domestic card payment network. As of December 2014 banks have issued 7.28 crore RuPay cards, which has a future potential use on CCAvenue. While banks successfully accomplished the target set by the government by openng 10 crore accounts under the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY). CCAvenue’s vernacular drive is a step in a right direction.

Karthik Reddy of co-founder and Managing Partner of Blume Ventures recently op-ed on YourStory The ‘English Internet’ is dead! Long live the (‘Hinglish, Binglish, Kinglish, Minglish, Tinglish, Ginglish et al Internet’). Or to summarize, the Indian Vernacular + English Internet = Vinglish Internet. It's time to welcome the Vinglish Internet! More power to the next 200 million Internet users in India.

Apart from English, CCAvenue also supports other International Languages, Arabic, Chinese, Simplified, Chinese Traditional, French, Deutsch, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish.