HomeShop18 and Microsoft Buddy-Up, Offer Vouchers to IE9 Upgraders

One of India’s biggest e-commerce sites, HomeShop18, has formed a tie-up with Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) to give online shopping gift vouchers to users who upgrade their browser to Internet Explorer 9, aka IE9.

As a part of the promotional partnership, IE9 will even be available for download from the HomeShop18 site. All the online shoppers need to do is switch over to IE9 and then pin the e-commerce site to their Windows 7 taskbar, making the shopper eligible for the voucher the next time they use the check-out. It’ll also make returning to HomeShop18 a lot quicker.

Of course, even if you prefer another browser, such as Firefox or Chrome, you could update IE in Windows 7 just to get this promotional offer, and then switch back to whatever you usually use for wandering the web.

In a press release to accompany the tie-up, the director of marketing at Microsoft India, Senthilkumar Sundaram, said his company was pleased to be working with “one of India’s fastest growing web destinations,” and that the update would be worthwhile to Indian netizens to give them an “all new immersive browsing experience.”

It’s an interesting bit of marketing from Microsoft, which is struggling to get people to upgrade from the ancient and insecure IE6 and IE7 in a number of countries – especially in China. Last month in India, six percent of web traffic was still coming from people on IE6, a browser which leaves users at risk of picking up spyware and viruses on the web. But XP users are out of luck, as they cannot update beyond IE8.

HomeShop18 has been pushing aggressively in the Indian e-commerce space this year, and recently wrapped up another interesting promo tie-up when it sold merchandise for the Bollywood blockbuster Ra.One.