ETSY - Etsy Inc. (ETSY) Nasdaq 49th Investor Conference Call Transcript
2023-12-06 10:21:04 ET
Etsy, Inc. (ETSY)
Nasdaq 49th Investor Conference
December 06, 2023, 08:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Josh Silverman - Chief Executive Officer
Rachel Glaser - Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Matthew Cost - Morgan Stanley
Presentation
Matthew Cost
Great. Well, hello everyone and good afternoon. My name is Matt Cost from Morgan Stanley, U.S. Internet team here subbing in for my colleague, Lauren Schenk . I'm thrilled today to be joined by the Etsy management team, Josh Silverman and Rachel Glaser, CEO and CFO. Thank you so much for being here.
Rachel Glaser
Thanks for having us and I'll just slip in a quick reference to our Safe Harbor, which can be found on our investor relations website.
Matthew Cost
Great. And then I'll do the same for the Morgan Stanley side. Please note that all important disclosures, including personal holdings disclosures and MS disclosures appear on the public website@morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures.
All right, we're through all the Safe Harbors.
Rachel Glaser
Yes.
Matthew Cost
Maybe Josh, we can start with you. For those that may not be as familiar with the Etsy story, can you start off by touching on the company's differentiation and how you see your competitive advantages in eComm, and then talk about strategy and how you've worked to grow Etsy since taking over?
Josh Silverman
Absolutely. So, Etsy is a marketplace for things that are handmade. You're buying directly from the person who made them or vintage. They're items that are more than 20 years old. And in a world that's becoming ever more commoditized, where people are selling the exact same items and trying to sell it for $0.02 cheaper or ship it to you two minutes faster, we're doing something genuinely different, and we've made a tremendous amount of progress.
There are now over 6 million creative entrepreneurs selling over 120 million items on Etsy to over 90 million active buyers in the U.S. and North America and all across Europe. And our strategy has really been to be great at what we do, which requires a set of competitive differentiations. Our mission is Keeping Commerce Human, and that requires, actually, some superpowers combining humans with machines to take this enormous corpus now of over 120 million items and be great at finding the right items for you.
So being really good at search and discovery, being really good at trust, and that for us, is a unique opportunity and a unique challenge, because you're buying from 6 million unbranded sellers. When you buy a can of Coke, you know exactly what it is, and you really don't care who you're buying it from. When you're buying something from Etsy, it's made just for you.
So we need to create trust in the brand that you're going to love the item, it's going to arrive on time and do that at real scale and do it in a way that also offers convenience, so you're able to get in, buy things and get out and do all of that in a way that feels genuinely human. So while everyone else is trying to really disintermediate the product and the customer, we create real lasting connections.
When you're on Etsy, you often are actually having a conversation with the maker. Can you do that in short sleeves? Can you make it in this color instead of that color? Can you maybe do something engraved or personalized for me? And that item often comes with a handwritten note from the seller. When is the last time you got a handwritten note from Jeff Bezos when you bought something on Amazon?
And so we think by doing something genuinely different than what everyone else is doing and in a way that requires a really unique set of capabilities, we're creating some real, sustainable competitive differentiation in a landscape where we think the opportunity is really huge.
Matthew Cost
Rachel, maybe I'll go to you. All three of Etsy's, Marketplaces, Etsy, Depop and Reverb, they have similar business models, but maybe you can explain a little bit about how each of them works and generates revenue?
Rachel Glaser
Absolutely. And I love that question because we love our business model and in fact, that was one of the sort of guiding principles for our acquisition strategy was marketplaces similar to Etsy, because we have sort of the expertise and the playbook to be able to share best practice with other marketplaces to help them scale as well. So we are a true two-sided marketplace. We have about 90 million active buyers on the buyer side, we have about over 6 million sellers on the seller side, about over 120 million listings for $0.20 an idea, you can list your item on Etsy. So there's a pretty low barrier, truly an open marketplace where basically the buyer demand is what makes the prominence or the vibrancy of the marketplace shine.
We charge the seller, not the buyer. So the seller pays some fees that are compulsory. So you pay your $0.20 per listing, which gives you four months to list it or until the item sells, whichever comes first. And then you pay 65% transaction fee. So for every sale you pay 6.5%. And then for markets that we offer Etsy payments in, which is now almost all the world, you pay another 3% to 4% for the payment transaction fee. And the last item that's semi-compulsory is when we spend our P&L on PLAs on offsite ads, the seller will pay a slightly higher transaction fee when that ad actually results in a purchase for them. Those are what we consider our marketplace fees.
And then we have services that we offer that are optional. The two primary ones are an onsite ad product where they can, the old paid inclusion model where they can pay to have their listing slightly more prominent in the search result. And we provide a shipping service where we negotiate favorable rates with carriers and pass on that discounted amount to the seller and they can opt into that, which provides a lot of value not only to them to get the discount, but to the marketplace overall, because it gives us tracking and the ability to more accurately measure when the item is going to be shipped and when it is expected to arrive.
Most of those features are also present in Reverb and Depop. I will note we had a third subsidiary marketplace Elo7 , that we divested recently, so there's two subsidiary marketplaces. Reverb is the Etsy of musical instruments, very similar, lower take rate. Etsy's take rate overall is about 20.8%. Reverb and Depop have slightly lower take rates, but similar models where you can -- they have a product called Bump where you can pay for that prominence in advertising. There's a shipping product and then there's a mandatory transaction fee.
Depop, also similar. They have an onsite ad product as well. They have a transaction fee and they have a shipping product. And Depop is similar to Etsy's apparel category, only it's all circular. It's all what we call recommerce. So that's the paint the picture on the other subsidiaries and how they relate to Etsy.
Josh Silverman
And one thing I would just jump in on there that we love about our business model is it's very capital light. Etsy does not actually touch the inventory. The seller makes it and she ships the product from her house to the buyer, which means we're not investing in inventory. We're not trying to guess what's going to be popular next season and putting our own capital at stake. We're not investing in warehouses or shipping facilities. So we're able to have very strong EBITDA margins, and a very high percentage of our EBITDA actually converts to free cash flow.
Rachel Glaser
Yes. So close to $800 million in EBITDA for Etsy consolidated $750 million I think, in the last year, so 90% of that converts to free cash flow.
Matthew Cost
Josh, let's stay with you. So Etsy grew materially before and during the pandemic, and you've generally kept those gains, but there have been some more challenges over the past two years. So I guess, can you talk about some of those challenges faced by the core Etsy marketplace? And then do you think that they're primarily related to macro and temporary rather than structural?
Josh Silverman
Yes. So let's start by level setting. Etsy today is about two and a half times bigger than it was right before the pandemic and it kind of stands to reason we had all the tailwinds going for us. You couldn't shop in retail, you couldn't dine out, you couldn't travel. And even when you wanted to buy online, most ecommerce competitors were out of stock unless you were buying hand wipes or toilet paper. So Etsy was really one of the only places you could spend your money where everything worked as normal. We were largely not out of stock on anything. Everything was shipping exactly on time. And governments in the U.S. and Europe were funneling money, especially in the U.S., funneling money into consumers wallets. And Etsy grew from about 42 million buyers to about 90 million buyers at that time.
Fast forward to today, where people are spending primarily on dining out and travel, they've had enough of buying things, and they're wanting to spend on travel and dining, we're facing a lot of inflation. All of those government subsidies have stopped. And the average buyer on Etsy is spending 25% more on Etsy today than they were before the pandemic and we have more active buyers today than we did even at the peak of the pandemic. We had about 92 million active buyers in the third quarter, which was an all-time high. So as we went through the pandemic, we kept saying, we think when the world reopens and we face a ton of competition, we will give back some of this share.
Many people were predicting that this is the new normal and that you're never going to give back. You did not hear that from us. You heard we think when people have other options to spend their money, we're going to lose some of the share. So we've held almost all of it. So now the opportunity is just how do we grow again from here? And the CAGRs, by the way, our GMS CAGR from pre-pandemic is about 24%, amazon is about 13, Wayfair is about 6 and Ebay is negative 3. So Etsy truly is in a category of its own in terms of our ability to retain share.
And we think that's because while tens of millions of people came to Etsy because they had virtually no other choice during the pandemic, they discovered that they really like the experience. It's a lot better than they thought, and they continue to come back now even when they face every other pressure. We are facing headwinds right now. Consumers have a lot of pressure on their wallet. They're facing high inflation, and in particular in the categories in which we are largest, things like home furnishings, craft supplies, those are categories that are really out of favor right now. And what we see is, while those categories are out of favor, we continue to gain share versus our pure play competitors, but in categories that are declining.
We're in a moment in the cycle right now where it's a tough part of the cycle and being old enough to have managed businesses through three economic cycles now, one of the things I think we both collectively have learned is don't get too exuberant at the top of the cycle. And you heard Etsy in the peak pandemic keep saying, we think some of this is -- some of this is going to dissipate and we're going to be thoughtful about managing our expenses. And now when we're in a much more challenging part of the cycle, don't be too despondent.
We have a very significant opportunity ahead and we have a big opportunity to continue to grow consideration for Etsy and continue to make the customer experience better. In our largest market, which is the United States, only one out of every three women has shopped on Etsy in the past twelve months and only one out of ten men have shopped on Etsy in the last twelve months. If we've got something really great for one out of every three women, I know we've got something for the other two thirds and certainly for the other 90% of men as well. And we're doing something truly different.
Almost everyone in ecommerce is trying to do Amazon one better; sell the exact same product that's available for sale on Amazon, but sell it just a little cheaper or ship it just a little faster. We do something genuinely different, and we know there's a big role for that. And the bigger the Amazons and the TIMO 's get in the world, the more people will be desperate for an alternative. I think we're well positioned to be the leading alternative to that and that we think, is a very big opportunity.
Matthew Cost
There's a couple of things I want to follow up on there, but let's talk about conversion and frequency. So the average Etsy buyer only shops on the site about three days per year, but you have many millions of visitors to the site every year who don't convert. So tell us why you think that is? How you're planning to drive that up over time, and what initiatives you're most excited about on the frequency and conversion side for next year?
Josh Silverman
Yes, so for a lot of ecommerce companies, actually, three purchase days per year would not be a bad metric, but for Etsy, the number of purchase occasions for which we are relevant is quite extraordinary. So it's home furnishings and jewelry, it's birthdays and weddings, it's babies and pets and everything in between, most things that you would want to buy. We don't sell consumer electronics or some categories that really are not relevant; food delivery, travel, but most of your ecommerce purchases, there is an alternative available on Etsy that can be made just for you and sold at a very reasonable price. You just didn't think of us for it.
So we know that we have a substantial opportunity to grow even more than three purchase days a year and to have a lot more active buyers, even in our core markets and then there is the opportunity for international expansion. Our opportunity to get there, what gives us confidence, first is the fact that we don't need to invent new purchase occasions on Etsy. There are so many good opportunities for which you can buy on Etsy and for which millions of people do buy on Etsy, but most of our shoppers still think of us very narrowly. If they came for a birthday gift, they think we only do birthday gifts. If they came for wedding, they think we only do weddings. If they came for baby products, they think we only do baby products. And the good news is, we do all of those things. We just need to help each buyer understand the breadth of our offering, and there's an opportunity for us to do that more in our customer experience as we showcase even more diversity.
There's an opportunity for us to attack brand barriers. The idea that you think because you're buying from an individual maker, it may not arrive on time, when in fact, on time delivery at Etsy we've made tremendous progress and is really good. You think, what if something goes wrong? When in fact, we've done a lot to make sure we have our buyers back and we'll take care of them if something goes wrong or you think you may be paying a big premium because it's made just for you, when in fact, the value offering on Etsy is very strong and we're doing more and more to promote that. So the good news is, we've made a lot of progress, and the buying experience on Etsy is actually very good. It's about helping buyers understand how good it is and actually experience it and experience it more often.
Matthew Cost
Let's revisit the point about some of the Chinese ecommerce companies like TIMO and SHEIN. Can you talk about the increased competition there and what you're doing specifically to respond to them?
Josh Silverman
Sure. Look, TIMO has come out of nowhere to be like $14 billion in sales. So they're taking a little bit of share from everyone. We have no evidence to suggest that they are disproportionately impacting Etsy. They're impacting all ecommerce players, and we don't see any evidence that they are disproportionately impacting Etsy. But in a world where consumer wallets are constrained, that $14 billion has to come from somewhere. I think the bigger impact that we are seeing right now for Etsy is that TIMO and SHEIN, and in particular TIMO, appears to be investing a lot in performance marketing and it's not obvious that they have much of an ROI lens on their spend.
So they appear to be spending a lot of money to acquire customers who may not have very large wallets and may not be very loyal. So we'll see how that strategy of spending a lot to acquire customers for whom the lifetime value is uncertain, I'm not sure how that's going to play out for them. We'll see, but we are not a growth at all cost company, and we've never been that way. We have a very strong ROI lens on every dollar we spend. And we look at every dollar we spend on employees, on marketing, and say, is that delivering good returns? Is that making the marketplace better in a way that delivers values for sellers, buyers and for our shareholders?
And so, to the extent that they are bidding up keywords in the performance marketing auctions, we are not going to follow a race to the bottom there. We're going to bid rationally for where that we see strong ROI and what you've seen us do in the fourth quarter is to reallocate some of that performance marketing to television. We also take a strong ROI lens on our TV spend, and we're seeing good performance in TV. And so if it becomes irrational to invest at the same degree in performance marketing, we'll find other channels like TV.
The other thing I'll say about marketing, and with regard to TIMO is, there's a lot of people focused on selling you cheap goods cheaper that end up in a landfill five minutes later. We think there's a big alternative to do something different that's truly meaningful, and in doing so, earn a spot in your mind. The human brain has room for very few brands you're going to actually remember. So almost every ecommerce site gets almost all of its traffic from Google and Facebook and is entirely reliant on those channels. Only about 20% to 25% of GMS on Etsy comes from directly from Google or Facebook.
The vast majority of our traffic comes from people who think of Etsy, know the brand and come to us because we do something different, and that is genuinely precious. There are a handful of e commerce brands out there that are different enough and important enough to earn one of those precious few spaces in your brand, in your brain, and we have done a lot to earn that and we think there's a huge opportunity to do even more and the size of the prize over time for that, we believe, is very significant.
Matthew Cost
Rachel, I mean, Josh talked a lot just now about marketing efficiency, and I think reiterated some of the comments from the last earnings call about how some of those China ecommerce companies are spending more aggressively on performance marketing. I guess, is there anything you would add about how you're reacting to that competitive marketing environment and anything you're doing from the finance side to mitigate that?
Rachel Glaser
So our marketing philosophy, as Josh just said, is to we don't give our marketers an absolute dollar budget, we give them an ROI threshold, and they keep spending dynamically until that last marginal dollar is no longer ROI positive. We also use the full funnel. So we -- performance marketing at the bottom of the funnel, in the middle, we've built up a sophisticated and effective CRM program where we can use email in our relationships with both buyers and sellers to target buyers with a specific message at the right time, at the right price point. We also use a lot of organic social in the middle there and then as we move up the funnel, we're using digital video and linear TV. They all work really nicely together. They're all measurable. We feel pretty confident about the ROI and all those things.
You saw us introduce, not just reactive to TIMO, but to the highly promotional nature of today's consumer right in this moment in time, we started to use Etsy's P&L a little bit for promotional offerings. Our sellers often use their P&Ls for promotional offerings, but we tested that as sort of a new marketing channel, if you will. We can spend dollars promoting or we can spend dollars on a performance ad, doesn’t make any difference to us. Whatever works from an ROI perspective, that was somewhat effective. But we've also been much more effective in curating across the 120 million items that we've had. We've been able to curate a position or an offering that is a deals tab. So all the deals that are, I don't know, 30% off or higher, we can curate those into the deals tab. We've been able to do sales.
So, like, if look at all of our holiday sales that are 40% off, that's the seller's P&L, and that works really effectively. The seller has always been promotional. They'll do a thank you coupon for 10% off, or you left this item in your cart, why don't you come back and buy it for 10% off? And we've been able to work with them, too, on thinking about the efficacy of a 10% off promotion, which is more or less just coming off of their margin, versus leaning in a little more heavily at certain points in time with higher promotional price points.
So we do this dynamic model. The impact of TIMO coming in and buying into the long tail means that we might cut ourselves off sooner, because we're just not going to keep spending into an ROI negative territory. It doesn't make sense for us. We just have to lap that next year and spend even more negatively to grow over it, so we don't do that. But then we've been able to spend in places where maybe some of the competitors aren't using their marketing dollars as much as we are.
Matthew Cost
Just to round off the marketing topic, Josh, I mean so on that point, Etsy spends over $700 million annually on marketing. Talk about your long-term approach to that, both for brand as well as performance marketing investment.
Josh Silverman
Yes, so at the top of the funnel, we're really trying to build awareness and consideration. If we think about awareness in the U.S. and the UK now, if you ask people, do you know the brand Etsy? Most people will say, yes. That's not so true in Germany, France and other places. And so we have leaned a little into television advertising in Germany, and we've seen a doubling of awareness. Even in the U.S. we've seen a 10 percentage point gain in awareness just in the past few years, and we think our television advertising has played a role. But consideration is the next big opportunity.
When you ask people, have you heard of Etsy? In the U.S. and the UK most people are going to say yes. If you ask them, what do you think of Etsy? Almost everyone you ask that question to is going to answer with the same three words, I love Etsy. But then when you ask them, when's the last time you shopped on Etsy, they're going to have to stop and think about it. And the answer is probably going to be, I'm not sure. And when you say, Why not? Well, I'm not sure I had a purchase occasion.
I guarantee you, if I look at the last things they've bought in the last 90 days, I can find three or four things at least, where we had something much better at a very fair price that would have arrived on time, they just didn't think of us. So in the U.S. and the UK, the big opportunity is in consideration for us and you're really seeing us lean into some very specific purchase occasions home, style and gifting, where those are not the only ones. Weddings, dog products, baby products, I can go on and on, but let's start with three.
And home style and gifting being opportunity areas where we really want to build consideration, that if you're buying something for home, Etsy should be one of the first things you think of. When you ask people in the U.S., name places to buy home furnishings, 3% of people will name Etsy. 3%. It's our largest category. Etsy sells billions of dollars of home furnishings every year. And if you say, name a place you associate with home furnishings, 3% of people will name Etsy. So we think we have a real opportunity in consideration.
Gifting is an area we're very excited about. It's actually quite a large TAM. When you think of all the gifts you buy throughout the year, not just Christmas, but birthdays and anniversaries and all the other things, it's actually quite a large TAM. No one owns it. We think no one is better positioned than Etsy to own gifting. And there are so many problems we can solve for you in Etsy that are really creative and unique. So building that consideration is important in the top of the funnel. But that's also where performance marketing comes in, because when you already have decided I'm looking for something and you're doing a search very often on Google, when you see, oh, you see the name Etsy, it doesn't take a lot of convincing.
It's like, of course Etsy sells table mats, of course Etsy sells great gifts for my mom, of course Etsy sells cool pet products. It just takes that little prompt. So we do find that it is quite effective there. But taking a full funnel approach has been very helpful for us. I will say we take a strong ROI point of view at every stage of the funnel. There's no part of the funnel where we just say we're going to throw money at it and hope for the best. We are very focused on measurement in each stage to make sure we're getting real value for money.
Matthew Cost
Rachel, let's talk about take rate for a minute, and I'm going to take a deep breath, because this is a multi-parter. So it's expanded over the past two years. It's now just above 20%. So how do you think about the value that you're offering to sellers? What opportunities do you see to increase take rate? And as part of that, can you comment on whether or not you still see Etsy ads as an important piece of continued take rate expansion?
Rachel Glaser
Absolutely. And we can tag team on this. We've guided to 20.8% take rate in the fourth quarter. If you look backwards to when Josh and I started in the company, we've pretty much taken take rate up every single year. Only two times, actually two times in the company's entire history have we actually changed the headline price. So we charged 6.5% for that transaction fee. It was 3.5% in 2017, and two times we changed that price. But the other ways of taking take rate up are by offering new services to our sellers or expanding services that we already offer, Etsy ads being one of them. So I'll come back to that point in just a moment.
We see ourselves sort of as in the middle of the pack relative to the take rates of other companies. We're not the lowest, nor are we the highest. We don't offer a differentiated take rate, meaning all categories that our sellers are in pay the same exact take rate, where others might offer higher take rates in higher margin businesses or items that need special processing. For instance, we offer one size fits all. We don't offer all the services that all of our competitors and maybe some of the seller enablement companies might offer.
So you might look to their rate cards to say, oh, where might Etsy go at some point in the future for additional services that we may offer? One that we've talked about specifically is Etsy payment. So today, about 94% of all of our sales runs through Etsy's payment platform. We find that to be a much better experience for the buyer and therefore a higher conversion rate when sellers use Etsy payments. So we mandated that in 2016 or maybe early 2017, I believe, but we're still not in a few countries. So as we further roll out Etsy payments to the last mile, we'll see some increase in take rate from more GMS rolling through our platform.
And we always look to a fair exchange of value. So those two times that we took the headline price up, we said, we are going to take the price up, but we're going to use that incremental revenue to invest it back in the marketplace to create more sales. So when our take rate goes up, that effectively brings lifetime value up and the higher the lifetime value, the more we can spend to achieve the same ROI or higher ROI. So, it's always that value of, we're going to give you something for it and it's a win-win for sellers, for buyers, and for Etsy.
Etsy Ads is one of the services we provide that gives the seller an opportunity to have more prominence on Etsy's site and we've been able to grow Etsy ads primarily through product improvement. So the more relevant the search is on an Etsy ad, just as the more relevant search is on any query for Etsy, the higher the conversion rate, and the higher the conversion rate, the better the return on ad sales is for our sellers. And then we can utilize more of the budget that they give us.
Today we don't utilize all of the budget because we don't want to spend it if we're not going to give them some minimum level of ROAS. And so the better we can improve our product experience, the better the ROAS, the more money we can spend from them. So that's just an example of how we see Etsy ads continuing to grow. And we also don't -- only about 50% of our sellers use Etsy ads, and so we think the right sellers are using Etsy ads, but the more the efficacy of that product can improve the more sellers we can get into the program.
Matthew Cost
Great. May be just in the last minute and change that we have you here, I'll go back to you, Josh, and maybe you can talk about what levers of long-term growth you're most excited for Etsy and you want investors to come away excited about as well?
Josh Silverman
First, only one out of every three women in the U.S. and only one out of every ten men in the U.S. has shopped on Etsy in the last twelve months. Roughly similar in the UK. If we went through the rest of Europe and much of the rest of the world, we're barely getting started. So, so many more people could and should be shopping on Etsy. If we have something for one out of every three women in the U.S., we've got something for the other two thirds as well. And we have a lot of opportunity to serve a lot more of their wallet. And attacking brand barriers around, I'm not sure it's going to arrive on time, I'm not sure I'm going to love it or am I paying a real premium to get this special experience?
We know there's a brand barriers that are in consumers' minds, but in fact we've made great progress on on-time delivery. Customers are the vast majority of the time delighted by the experience and we know sellers can deliver great value for money. So it's not that we have big problems in the customer experience we necessarily need to fix. We've done a lot to already fix them. We need to communicate that and build that confidence with the buyer base.
And then there is continued opportunity to make Etsy easier to shop on by making it easier to find exactly the right thing. We have over 120 million things for sale on Etsy and you're going to buy one. Finding that one out of 120 million to sell you right now, the power of machine learning to help get you to that one, the power someday of Gen AI to help have a guided personal shopper to help take you through that experience, I think Etsy may have more to gain from Gen AI than almost anyone in terms of finding that perfect one in 120 million experience for you in this purchase occasion. And the better we get at that, the more often you're going to come, the more often you're going to shop, the better we all do.
Matthew Cost
That's a great point to close on. Thank you both so much for being here.
Rachel Glaser
Thanks for having us.
Josh Silverman
Thank you.
Question-and-Answer Session
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Etsy, Inc. (ETSY) Nasdaq 49th Investor Conference Call Transcript