Ecommerce Website Development in Pune: Building a Marathi and Hindi Online Store — Translation, hreflang, Fonts and SEO Done Right

Ecommerce Website Development in Pune: Building a Marathi and Hindi Online Store — Translation, hreflang, Fonts and SEO Done Right

A Marathi and Hindi online store is built by giving each language its own crawlable URL (usually a subfolder such as /mr/ and /hi/), translating the content a shopper actually reads and buys from (products, attributes, checkout, emails, policies), linking the versions together with correct hreflang annotations, and loading a Devanagari font in a way that does not slow the page. Good ecommerce website development in Pune for a multilingual store treats language as part of the catalogue and the checkout, not as a "translate" button added at the end. Whether it pays off depends on who your buyers are, and the first section below helps you decide.

This article is for store owners in Pune and across Maharashtra who sell, or want to sell, to customers more comfortable in Marathi or Hindi than English. It does not cover shipping, tax or payment fees. Technical claims come from Google Search Central, Shopify Help Center and plugin vendor pages read in October 2026. Where a vendor page did not state something, such as whether a plugin lists Marathi, we say so. Costs are marked TODO.

When a Marathi and Hindi storefront is actually worth it

Language is not a free upgrade. Every language you add is another catalogue to keep accurate, another set of emails and policy pages, and more support conversations to staff. So begin with evidence, not enthusiasm.

Signals that it is worth it: customers already message you in Marathi or Hindi on WhatsApp or phone; your products suit buyers whose first language is not English (regional foods, devotional items, handloom clothing, agricultural inputs, books, home goods); Search Console or Google Ads search terms show queries in Devanagari or in Marathi/Hindi typed in English letters; competitors in your category are English-only.

Signals to wait: your English store still has slow pages or a weak checkout (translating a weak page gives you a weak page in three languages); you cannot commit someone to review translations and answer support; or your own data says buyers are English-comfortable.

A sensible middle path is to launch one extra language first, the one your data points to, with a limited set of pages: homepage, top categories, best sellers, checkout, order emails and policies. Expand when orders arrive through that language. If you are still choosing a platform, our comparison of Shopify, WooCommerce and custom builds explains the differences.

URL structure: why subfolders are usually the right choice

Google's multi-regional and multilingual guidance lists three ways to separate language versions: country-code domains, subdomains and subdirectories (subfolders). It describes country-code domains as giving clear geotargeting but being expensive and limited to one country, subdomains as easy to set up, and subdirectories as low-maintenance on a single host. It says URL parameters are not recommended because segmenting by them is difficult.

For a Maharashtra store that sells in India, a country-code domain per language makes no sense: Marathi and Hindi are languages, not countries. Subfolders are the practical default:

• yourstore.in/ for English
• yourstore.in/mr/ for Marathi
• yourstore.in/hi/ for Hindi

Shopify's international SEO help page makes the same recommendation for most stores, noting that subfolders share domain authority with your primary domain and are easier to implement. WooCommerce plugins such as WPML, Polylang and TranslatePress also work with per-language URL structures, including subfolders (see the platform section below).

Two rules follow. Give each language its own URL: a page that switches language by cookie or JavaScript at one address gives search engines one version to index, and Google says it determines language from visible content. Do not force-redirect visitors by language: Google advises avoiding automatic redirects between versions and adding visible links so people can choose, and notes IP-based adaptation is difficult and generally unreliable. A visible language switcher beats a clever redirect.

On slugs, choose one convention (English-letter, transliterated or Devanagari) and test how links look when pasted into WhatsApp; Devanagari URLs get percent-encoded when copied. That is a team decision, not something Google dictates.

hreflang: the rules that matter for a three-language store

hreflang is how you tell Google that several URLs are the same page in different languages. Google's "localized versions" documentation describes three equivalent ways to do it: link elements in the page head, HTTP headers (for non-HTML files), or XML sitemap entries. Use one method consistently.

The rules, in plain terms:

Every version lists every version, including itself. Google says that if page X links to page Y, page Y must link back to page X, or the annotations may be ignored. Each page must also include a self-referencing annotation. For a product available in three languages, each of the three pages carries three annotations plus x-default if you use it.

Use valid codes. The format is a language code (ISO 639-1), optionally with a region (ISO 3166-1 alpha-2). Language-only codes such as mr and hi are valid; a region on its own is not. For an India-only store, mr and hi are enough.

Add x-default for the fallback. x-default is for users whose language does not match any of your versions. For a store whose primary language is English, point it to the English page or to a language-selection page.

Canonical is separate. Each language page should canonical to itself. Google notes that localized versions are only treated as duplicates if the main content stays untranslated. Pointing the Marathi page's canonical at the English page effectively tells Google to ignore the Marathi page.

A product page's head might contain:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://yourstore.in/products/kesar-mango-pulp" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="mr" href="https://yourstore.in/mr/products/kesar-mango-pulp" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="hi" href="https://yourstore.in/hi/products/kesar-mango-pulp" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://yourstore.in/products/kesar-mango-pulp" />

The same four lines appear on all three pages. Mistakes we would look for in an audit: missing return links, hreflang pointing to a redirected or noindexed URL, and a language page whose content is still English.

Platforms usually generate this. Shopify's help page says hreflang tags are generated automatically (with an option to disable them if you implement your own), that canonical URLs are set automatically, and that its sitemaps include market-specific URLs with hreflang annotations. WooCommerce Multilingual's documentation lists per-language URLs, hreflang tags, XML sitemaps and structured data among its SEO features, and TranslatePress's SEO Pack documentation says it sets hreflang and builds a multilingual sitemap. Verify the output on real pages rather than trusting a checkbox.

Machine translation versus human translation

What Google says. Google's spam policies on scaled content abuse include generating many pages without adding value for users, and scraping content to produce many pages "through automated transformations like synonymizing, translating, or other obfuscation techniques," where little value is provided. Separately, Google's guidance on generative AI content says output can contain inaccuracies and should be fact-checked before publishing, including titles, meta descriptions, structured data and alt text. This is not a ban on translation tools, but a store that machine-translates thousands of products and publishes them unreviewed is the risk case, and a customer-experience risk regardless of ranking.

In practice, treat machine translation as a draft tool. For Marathi and Hindi it can help with long descriptions, but it often struggles with product-specific terms, regional vocabulary, tone (formal or casual register), English words customers actually use, and units. Shopify's Translate & Adapt offers manual or AI translation, and TranslatePress offers manual and automatic translation including slugs; check each tool's current language list and quality first.

Keep a short glossary: how you translate your brand, product types and return wording, and which English words stay English. Never publish a half-translated page; Google's guidance warns against translating only boilerplate, and customers lose trust.

Translating product data, not just page text

A product is more than its description. Each of these needs a decision:

• Title and description. Use the names local customers actually use; a buyer may type the Marathi, Hindi or English name.
• Attributes and variations. If "Colour: Red" is translated on the product but the cart dropdown still says "Red", the experience breaks. WooCommerce Multilingual says it translates attributes, variations, gallery alt text and custom fields; Polylang for WooCommerce also covers attributes, with Polylang Pro needed for WooCommerce URL slugs. Confirm the same for any Shopify app.
• Categories and filters. Facet labels and breadcrumbs. Every language multiplies your filter URLs, so read our guide on faceted navigation SEO.
• Alt text and structured data. Product schema should carry the translated text on the Marathi page, not the default-language text; check the output.
• Numerals and units. Decide whether prices use Latin or Devanagari digits and keep it consistent across catalogue, cart and emails.
• Single stock and price. These should live in one place and sync to every language. Polylang's description says prices and stock synchronise across translations; confirm any plugin does before launch.

Devanagari fonts and page speed

Marathi and Hindi both use Devanagari, so one family can cover both. Noto Sans Devanagari, part of Google's Noto family, is a common choice. We could not retrieve its specimen page in detail, so check listed weights and coverage, and test with real Marathi content including conjuncts and Marathi-specific letters such as ळ.

These principles come from web.dev's font best practices:

• Use WOFF2. web.dev says it is supported everywhere and compresses about 30% better than WOFF.
• Subset with unicode-range so English-only pages never download the Devanagari file. Google Fonts already splits families this way; if you self-host, do it yourself, and test with a long, varied Marathi paragraph so no conjunct forms go missing.
• Choose font-display deliberately. web.dev describes swap as prioritising quick text display but possibly shifting layout, block as delaying text, and optional as best for performance. For a store, swap plus a matched fallback is the usual compromise, so prices are readable immediately.
• Use size-adjust to reduce shift between fallback and web font, and give Devanagari a more generous line-height than Latin text, since tall ascenders and conjuncts clip easily.
• Limit weights and preload carefully. Regular and bold are usually enough. web.dev warns that preload can divert resources from other critical assets, so preload only the one file used above the fold on Marathi/Hindi pages.
• Self-host or Google Fonts? web.dev advises self-hosting mainly with a CDN and HTTP/2; otherwise third-party providers may perform better. Either way, check your privacy policy reflects the choice.

Compare PageSpeed Insights results for English and Marathi versions of one product page on a mid-range phone. Set lang="mr" or lang="hi" on the page for screen readers and browsers.

Checkout, emails and policy pages in each language

A shopper who reads your product page in Marathi and meets an English checkout often abandons at the moment trust matters most. Scope must include:

• Checkout fields, hints and errors.
• Transactional emails. Shopify's help page says checkout and email notifications display in the customer's language once a language is published, and you can edit and preview notification translations per language. WooCommerce Multilingual says WooCommerce emails and checkout render in the customer's language on classic and block checkout; Polylang says the same of emails. Place real test orders in each language rather than assuming.
• Policy pages. A translated return or privacy policy must say the same as the original; a mismatch is a dispute risk. Have the policy owner sign off, and ask a lawyer how to state which version prevails.
• Account, error and thank-you pages, and third-party widgets with their own language settings.

For how we approach checkout design, see our checkout system service page.

Search in Devanagari, English letters and mixed spelling

Google search. Shoppers type Marathi and Hindi queries in Devanagari and in Roman letters. Reflect natural usage: the Marathi page title can use the Marathi name, with the common Roman spelling in the description where it reads naturally. Do not stuff spellings into hidden text or long lists; Google's spam policies treat hidden text and keyword stuffing as violations.

On-site search. Default store search is often built for English. Test it: search a product by its Marathi, Hindi and English names and a Roman-letter spelling; try spelling variants (चप्पल, चपला, chappal); check that results respect the language being browsed; check that no-result pages offer a next step. If results are poor, options include synonym lists, per-language index fields or a dedicated search service. Our post on site search and category navigation goes deeper. Confirm any search tool documents Devanagari handling before you pay for it.

WhatsApp support in the shopper's language

A multilingual storefront without multilingual support makes a promise you cannot keep.

• Decide who answers, and in which hours. A bot that greets in Marathi but hands over to an English-only agent is worse than a clear English greeting.
• Match the language. Put a WhatsApp link on each language's pages with a pre-filled message in that language, so your team knows how to reply.
• Templates. If you use the WhatsApp Business Platform for order updates, plan translations and approvals per language ahead of launch, and check Meta's current template rules.
• Chatbots. Mixed Marathi-English messages are hard for bots; see our article on a multilingual WhatsApp chatbot for India and our WhatsApp Business API page.

For organisations rather than stores, see our guide to multilingual NGO websites in India.

Platform notes: Shopify, WooCommerce, custom

Shopify's Help Center says you can add languages so customers can read product details, policies and checkout in their own language, translate manually or with AI in Translate & Adapt (CSV files and third-party apps are alternatives), and that each published language gets its own URLs. We could not confirm from the pages we fetched whether Marathi and Hindi are on Shopify's supported list or whether limits apply by plan; check the Markets language settings in your admin before planning around it.

For WooCommerce, WPML (with WooCommerce Multilingual), Polylang for WooCommerce and TranslatePress all provide language-aware URLs. WooCommerce Multilingual's page lists supported languages that did not include Marathi or Hindi in the summary we retrieved. That does not necessarily mean they are unsupported, since plugins often allow custom languages, so test on a staging site before buying. With a custom build you own routing, hreflang output, sitemaps and the translation editing screens: the most control and the most work. Whatever the platform, ask for a translation workflow: who writes, who reviews, and how a change to English flags other languages for retranslation.

Testing before and after launch

Before launch, on staging: confirm every language page has a self-referencing canonical and the full hreflang set with working return links; confirm nothing redirects by browser language or IP; place a test order in each language and read every email; open pages on a low-end Android phone to check conjunct rendering and clipped text; run PageSpeed Insights on the English and Marathi versions of the same page; and check the sitemap lists each language URL with no leftover noindex from staging.

After launch, filter Search Console's performance report by page (for example /mr/), crawl the site periodically for hreflang errors, compare conversion rate by language rather than traffic alone, and read the first month of WhatsApp chats for confusing product text.

Maintenance cost drivers

We do not quote prices here because they depend on catalogue, platform and scope. The drivers are: number of products and variants (each title, description, attribute and alt text multiplies per language), translation method and native review, plugin or app licences (check current vendor pricing), design and font work for longer Marathi text, checkout and email translation plus testing, ongoing translation of new products and offers, Marathi/Hindi-capable support staffing, and periodic SEO checks. Range for each: TODO: confirm per scope. The biggest long-term cost is usually translating every new product, offer and policy change, not the build.

A worked example: a Pune food and gift store adds Marathi first

Imagine a small Pune store (not a real client) selling regional snacks and festival gift boxes: about 250 WooCommerce products, English only, with many Marathi WhatsApp questions such as "what is in this box?"

Decide with data. Search Console shows Roman-letter Marathi queries landing on English pages, and most ingredient questions on WhatsApp arrive in Marathi. Marathi goes first; Hindi waits for evidence.

Scope. Homepage, six categories, the 30 best-selling products, checkout, order emails and the return and privacy policies. The other 220 products stay English-only until translated.

Structure and translation. English at the root, Marathi at /mr/. The plugin is tested on staging first, hreflang is checked per product pair, x-default points to English. A native speaker writes the top-30 titles and descriptions, sets a glossary, and reviews machine drafts. Ingredient and allergen text is checked line by line against English, because an error there is a safety issue, not a style issue.

Fonts, checkout, WhatsApp. Noto Sans Devanagari in regular and bold, WOFF2, font-display: swap, generous line-height, wider buttons. Test orders in both languages reveal that the "order shipped" email is still English; it is fixed. WhatsApp links on Marathi pages open with a pre-filled Marathi message.

Measure. After four to eight weeks, compare Marathi conversion and WhatsApp volume with English, then decide on the next 50 products and Hindi.

Working with Govindani Infotech

Govindani Infotech is a web design and development company on Satara Road, Parvati Paytha, Pune. If you are weighing a Marathi or Hindi storefront, we can review your current store, look at what customers ask on WhatsApp and in Search Console, and tell you whether to add a language, which one to start with, and what to leave in English for now. We can also audit an existing multilingual store for missing hreflang return links, untranslated checkout strings, slow fonts and weak Devanagari search.

Our ecommerce development service page describes how we build stores, and our SEO service page covers technical and content audits. To talk through your store, message us on WhatsApp or use the contact page, and include your store URL and the platform it runs on.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I use subfolders or separate domains for a Marathi and Hindi store?

Subfolders such as /mr/ and /hi/ are usually the practical choice. Google describes subdirectories as low-maintenance on a single host, and Shopify recommends subfolders for most stores because they share your main domain's authority.

Do I need hreflang if I only translate part of my store?

Yes, for the pages that exist in more than one language. Each translated page should reference itself and its counterparts, and the counterparts must link back. Do not publish language URLs for untranslated products.

Is machine translation acceptable for Marathi and Hindi product pages?

Use it as a draft, not a final version. Google's spam policies target scaled, low-value content produced by automated translation, and its guidance asks publishers to fact-check generated text. Have a native speaker review titles, checkout, emails, policies and your best-selling products first.

Will Devanagari fonts slow down my store?

They can if loaded carelessly. Use WOFF2, limit weights, subset with unicode-range, set font-display deliberately and preload only what the first screen needs.

How much does a multilingual ecommerce site cost in Pune?

It depends on catalogue size, platform, translation method and how often content changes, so we do not quote a range here (TODO: confirm per scope). Ask for ongoing translation to be scoped too.

Sources:

• Google Search Central: Tell Google about localized versions of your page
• Google Search Central: Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites
• Google Search Central: Spam policies
• Google Search Central: Using generative AI content
• Shopify Help Center: Languages
• Shopify Help Center: International SEO for markets
• WPML: WooCommerce Multilingual
• Polylang: Translating WooCommerce URLs, emails and other settings
• TranslatePress: SEO Pack
• web.dev: Best practices for fonts