Running a Shopify Store in Hindi and Other Indian Languages
Shopify can run your store in Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu, with checkout and order emails translated for you. Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi and Odia are a different story. This guide covers what Shopify supports today, how languages and URLs work, which pages to translate first, and the mistakes that make a regional language store look worse than an English one.
We checked every platform detail below against Shopify's Help Center and the Translate & Adapt App Store listing on 5 November 2026. Shopify changes these pages often, so confirm the limits in your own admin before you plan a launch.
Why would an Indian D2C brand add Hindi or a regional language?
Most Indian Shopify stores launch in English, and for many categories that is the right call. Your Instagram ads are in English, your founders think in English, and a large share of online shoppers in metros are comfortable reading product pages in English.
The case for a second language usually comes from your own customers, not from a trend report. A few patterns we see:
- Your WhatsApp support is already bilingual. If your team answers half the questions in Hindi or Marathi, some of your buyers would rather read the size guide in that language too.
- Your ads already run in a regional language. A shopper who clicks a Tamil ad and lands on an English page has to switch context at the worst moment.
- Your product is rooted in a region. Ayurveda, regional food, handloom and devotional products often have a buyer who searches in their own language.
- Older buyers and gift buyers. Parents buying for children, or families ordering for a festival, are more likely to hesitate on an English only checkout.
If none of these apply, a second language is a nice to have and you should spend the money on product pages and speed first. If two or more apply, it is worth a small test.
Which Indian languages does Shopify support?
There are two separate questions here, and merchants often mix them up.
Can you publish a store in that language? Translate & Adapt lists 100 plus languages, and you can add translations for any language you publish. So in principle you can run product pages, collections and blog posts in almost any Indian language, as long as you or a translator write the content.
Does Shopify supply the default text? This is the part that matters for trust. Shopify's requirements page lists the languages that have translations ready for checkout, the cookie banner, the privacy policy, the data sales opt out page and default text in Shopify built themes. For India, that list includes:
- Hindi
- Bengali
- Gujarati
- Marathi
- Tamil
- Telugu
- Urdu
Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi and Odia are not on that list. You can still translate your own product and page content into them, but the checkout and the theme's built in text, such as "Add to cart" or "Your cart is empty", will not come pre translated. You would need a third party translation app or custom work for those strings, and checkout language customisation needs third party apps according to Shopify.
The plan limits are generous for most brands. Shopify allows up to 20 languages on Basic, Grow, Shopify and Advanced, and up to 30 on Shopify Plus. In practice an Indian store rarely needs more than two or three.
How do languages and URLs work on a Shopify store?
When you publish a language, Shopify creates a separate URL for every translated page by adding the language code. If your domain is example.com and you publish Hindi, your Hindi pages live under a subfolder such as example.com/hi. Shopify adds hreflang tags automatically, which tells Google which version to show to which searcher.
A few details trip people up:
- URL handles can be translated, but only partly. You can translate /products/kurta into a Hindi handle, but the word "products" in the path stays as it is.
- Tags cannot be translated. If your theme shows product tags as filters or badges, Hindi shoppers will see them in English.
- SEO titles follow your settings. If you never customised the meta title and description on a product, Shopify uses the translated product title and description automatically. If you did customise them, translate those fields too, or Google will show an English snippet for a Hindi page.
- Translated content does not slow the store. Shopify serves translations dynamically without duplicating your store data, so adding a language does not affect performance.
Your theme also needs a language selector. Most Shopify themes include one that you switch on in the theme editor, and Shopify's developer docs explain how a custom theme should build country and language selectors in its localisation guide. If your theme was built from scratch, check that internal links use the routes object rather than hard coded paths such as /cart. Hard coded links quietly send Hindi shoppers back to English pages.
We are not covering selling abroad here. If you need different currencies and languages for buyers in the Gulf, our post on Arabic and Urdu right to left stores covers that setup.
Should you use Translate & Adapt, AI translation or a human translator?
Translate & Adapt is Shopify's own free app, and it installs automatically when you add a new language. It gives you a side by side editor, and its listing says you can use translations by Shopify for up to 2 languages, or 8 in select countries. You can also import translations by CSV or use a compatible third party app.
Our view is simple. Use AI translation to get a complete first draft, then have a native speaker review every page that a buyer reads before paying. Machine translation of Indian languages has improved, but the errors it makes are the expensive kind:
- Formal register where a brand voice is casual. A playful English product description can come out sounding like a government notice.
- Product terms translated literally. Fabric names, ayurvedic ingredients and sizes often read better left in English or Hinglish, written in Devanagari or kept in Latin script.
- Numbers, units and sizes. Check that "Free size", "Pack of 2" and dimensions survive translation exactly.
- Policies. Your return and refund policy is a legal promise. Have someone who reads the language confirm it says the same thing as the English version.
A practical choice many Indian brands make is Hinglish for marketing copy and pure Hindi for policies and checkout. That is a brand decision, not a technical one, but decide it before anyone translates a word, or you will end up with three styles on one site.
Photo: shankar s. via Flickr, CC BY 2.0
Which pages should you translate first?
Do not try to translate 400 products on day one. Translate the pages that decide whether someone buys, then expand.
- Your top selling products. Pick the products that bring most of your revenue. Translate titles, descriptions, size charts and variant names.
- Shipping, COD and returns information. These answer the questions that stop Indian buyers at checkout: when will it arrive, can I pay on delivery, what if it does not fit.
- Navigation, announcement bar and footer. A Hindi product page inside an English menu feels unfinished.
- Policies. Refund, shipping, privacy and terms.
- Notification emails. After you publish a language, Shopify sends checkout and notification emails in the customer's language. Review the order confirmation and shipping emails, especially if you customised the English versions.
- Collections and the homepage. These matter for browsing, but a shopper arriving from an ad usually lands on a product page.
What breaks when you add a regional language to a Shopify theme?
Most problems are visual and only show up on a phone.
- Fonts without Devanagari or Tamil glyphs. Many stylish Latin fonts simply do not contain Indian scripts, so the browser falls back to a system font mid sentence. Pick a font family that covers the script, such as the Noto Sans Devanagari family for Hindi and Marathi, and check how it loads.
- Line height and button sizes. Devanagari has marks above and below the line. Tight line heights clip them, and fixed width buttons can overflow when "Add to cart" becomes longer in translation.
- Text baked into images. Banners with English text inside the image stay English. Either use theme text over images or prepare a second banner and adapt it per language in Translate & Adapt.
- App widgets. Reviews, WhatsApp buttons, size charts and pincode checkers come from apps. Some support your language, some do not. Check every widget on the product page.
- Search and filters. A shopper typing in Hindi may get no results if your products are tagged only in English. Decide whether search should match transliterated words, and test it.
How do you measure whether the Hindi version is working?
Give it enough time and traffic to tell you something. Before you publish, decide what success looks like, such as conversion rate on the Hindi product pages compared with the same products in English, or fewer pre purchase questions on WhatsApp.
- Watch Search Console for the /hi pages being indexed and which queries they appear for.
- Compare add to cart and checkout rates by language in Shopify Analytics or your analytics tool, filtered by landing page path.
- Ask your support team whether the questions changed. Fewer "COD available?" messages is a real signal.
- Run ads in the regional language to the regional pages. Sending regional ad traffic to English pages tells you nothing about the translation.
If the numbers do not move after a fair test, the language may not be your bottleneck. Product page clarity, delivery promises and speed often matter more, which is why we look at the whole funnel, as we explain in our post on what ranks on Shopify in 2026.
Is a regional language store worth the effort for a small brand?
For a small catalogue, the setup is lighter than most founders expect. Shopify handles URLs, hreflang, checkout text in the supported languages and the language selector. The real work is content: good translation, a native speaker review, fonts that render, and keeping translations updated when you change a product. Translate & Adapt marks a translation as outdated when the source text changes, so build that check into your weekly product update routine.
The effort grows with the catalogue. A brand adding 30 products a month needs a translation step in its product launch process, not a one time project. If nobody owns that step, the second language slowly falls behind and starts to hurt trust instead of building it.
Thinking about a Hindi or regional language store? Write to us at hello@exactwhy.com with the subject "Regional language store review". We will look at your theme, fonts, apps and top product pages for free and tell you what would break and what to translate first. If the setup needs theme or app work, we quote it after that review, and ongoing store support is available on a monthly retainer.