, co-founder and CEO of Snapdeal, has decisively raised the pitch against Flipkart , emphatic that his company will become India’s largest ecommerce firm in terms of gross sales this fiscal year. Snapdeal has made some deft moves acquiring recharge and payments platform FreeCharge and making a strategic investment in logistics firm GoJavas , in addition to selling high-value items such as yachts and homes that could boost gross merchandise value, or GMV. Bahl also said Flipkart’s decision to make its fashion unit Myntra a mobile application-only platform was the “most consumer-unfriendly idea.” Edited excerpts from an interview withRelatively speaking, we will be ahead of (Flipkart). In terms of absolute numbers, I’m going to keep that close to my chest now. Whatever number they are saying they will be at, I can guarantee that we will be ahead of them. I don’t know what the latest projected numbers are, but based on the trajectory we’re demonstrating right now, I’m very confident that whatever their numbers are, we will be ahead of them by March.One thing that really helped our fashion business was Myntra’s app-only strategy… I think it’s the most consumer-unfriendly idea I have ever heard of. Maybe three years later it’s worth a conversation, when personal computer contribution is even lesser. Even then, it is a conversation still. It’s not a yes or no situation.What about the remaining 25%? Why should we change consumer behaviour, when it pertains to moving from PC to mobile, when consumers want PC? It’s not right to see it only from the perspective that 25% of our orders come through the PC. Twenty-five percent of all discovery for orders that are eventually placed on mobile come from the PC. People start browsing on the PC and start buying on the mobile.When these guys (Myntra) announced they were going app-only, we decided to hold a survey for our consumers… While only 20-30% use the PC platform, 80% of all consumers wanted the PC site to remain. We’re not going to go against consumers’ wishes. Snapdeal stands for choice.How do you get 300 million ecommerce buyers on your platform? You have to offer all choices—all choices in terms of all screens and all payment methods. Our overall team feels very strongly about this. We’ve had discussions about this, and we were like (Myntra’s) is the dumbest and most consumer-unfriendly idea ever.Nothing. A few engineers, right? I’m sure, if someone was running out of money, and they tell their investors, “Give me few million dollars more to keep my PC site up and running,” they (the investors) will not say no. They will not say “I’ve given you $2 billion already, but I won’t give you another $10 million to keep your PC site up and running.” That’s pretty ridiculous.We started planning for Diwali in February, nearly eight to nine months in advance. It was also one reasons we invested in GoJavas. We realised that one of the areas where the industry had a bad time last year, was because the existing third-party logistics players didn't have capacity.This is where we came in and said we don't want to run a logistics company, but we want to enter into a deep strategic partnership with one, where we can share, very transparently, our plans for Diwali, so that they can start planning eight or nine months in advance.Our technology mostly held together held together last time. One way to judge whether your technology is breaking or not, is to hold flash sales, which put tremendous pressure on all your systems… We’ve held flash sales, and we sold 50,000 units of Micromax CanvasSpark mobile phones, and never has our platform broken. I can’t say that about others. We’ve heard about when Xiaomi was launched. We’ve been doing a lot of stress testing over the last few months.This year the demand will be even higher, but we’ve set our bar even higher. I think we will be very surprised if we are not in good shape… While others have been in this business for many, many years, whether globally, or even someone like Flipkart, which has been in this business in India for the last 8 or 9 years, I would’ve thought they would’ve been better prepared for us, given it was just our second Diwali, as a products marketplace.Last year was great exercise in preparation for us. This Diwali we’re extremely well prepared. Since February, I’ve been holding fortnightly meetings with a SWOT team that’s only been focused on Diwali preparations, across functions. I’ve been deeply engaged in that because I feel this Diwali the market share will move very materially. This Diwali our plans are mega.The publicly available (gross merchandise value, or GMV) numbers for someone like Flipkart is about $4 billion... As of this month, we’ve crossed $4 billion also. My view is, come March 2016, over the next six-odd months, we will be decisively ahead of them.