Wix.Com Ltd

NASDAQ:WIX

Earnings Call Analysis

Wix Q3 2023: Strong Growth, Optimistic Outlook

Wix's Q3 2023 showed exceptional performance, with $394 million in revenue, surpassing guidance by $3 million, and free cash flow representing 16% of revenue. The company's Partners business, especially notable with the introduction of Wix Studio, soared by 38% year-over-year. Wix's AI innovations, like AI Meta Tags Creator and Conversational AI Chat Experience, are set to further drive user success. Transaction revenue jumped 22% from last year, propelled by Wix Payments. Despite the tumult from events in Israel, Wix maintains a robust business continuity plan, ensuring operations remain unaffected. Looking ahead, Wix raised its full-year revenue and free cash flow guidance, anticipating a continuation of the strong trajectory into Q4 and beyond.

A Tremendous Third Quarter: Surpassing Growth and Profitability Targets

The third quarter for the company was exceptional, outperforming growth and profitability expectations. The revenue climbed to $394 million, surpassing their already ambitious guidance by $3 million. Impressively, they generated over $62 million in free cash flow, constituting 16% of revenues and exceeding their projections. The culmination of their year-to-date performances led them to raise the revenue and free cash flow guidance, suggesting an optimistic close to the year beyond the margins anticipated in August.

Partners Business: The Engine of Top-Line Growth

The Partners segment emerged as a significant component of the company's top-line growth, boasting a remarkable 38% year-over-year increase. The team's efforts to understand professional needs and innovate products have paid off, with Wix Studio, the latest offering tailored for partners, enjoying a stellar reception. Users praised its responsive AI technology and workflow enhancing features. The success of Studio, underscored by thousands of live sites and account registrations surpassing expectations, has been fueled by extensive educational and onboarding initiatives.

Leveraging AI to Forge the Path Ahead

The company's nearly decade-long experience with AI has borne fruit in delivering products that make creation more effortless, as evidenced by their latest AI Meta Tags Creator and Conversational AI Chat Experience for Business. These tools are set to bolster users, offering SEO enhancement and efficient business onboarding. As the company introduces more AI-driven products, they expect these innovations to significantly contribute to the fourth quarter's momentum and beyond, while balancing the productivity of their global team amidst the backdrop of the situation in Israel.

Robust Financial Performance and Future Outlook

Financial indicators reflect strong company health, with a significant increase in free cash flow by 28% compared to the previous year, reaching over $62 million. The fourth quarter is poised for continued revenue growth, projected between $400 million to $405 million, a 13% to 14% year-over-year growth. Full-year revenue expectations have been raised to approximately $1.558 billion to $1.563 billion, equating to a 12% to 13% growth from the previous year. With a forward-looking stance, the company projects an accelerated path to profitability, enhancing the free cash flow forecast for 2023 to $235 million to $240 million, or about 15% of revenue. This outlook sets the stage for hitting a minimum 25% free cash flow margin sooner than the 2025 target, in line with the Rule of 40 paradigm.

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q3

[Operator]

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Wix Q3 2023 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today. Emily Liu with Investor Relations. Emily, please go ahead.

[Emily Liu, executive]

Thanks, [ Stacy ], and good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Wix's Third Quarter 2023 Call. Joining me today to discuss our results are Avishai Abrahami, our CEO and Co-Founder; Nir Zohar, our President and COO; and Lior Shemesh, our CFO.

During the call, we may make forward-looking statements, and these statements are based on current expectations and assumptions. Please consider the risk factors included in our press release and most recent Form 20-F that could cause our actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements.

We do not undertake any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. In addition, we will comment on non-GAAP financial results, and key operating metrics. You can find all reconciliations between our GAAP and non-GAAP results in the earnings materials and in our Interactive Analyst Center on the Investor Relations section of our website, investors.wix.com.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Avishai.

[Avishai Abrahami, executive]

Thanks, Emily, and good morning, everyone. We delivered a tremendous third quarter that exceeds both growth and profitability expectation for another consecutive quarter. Revenue in Q3 grew to $394 million, which is $3 million above the high end of our guidance. We generated more than $62 million of free cash flow or 16% of revenues, ahead of our expectations.

As a result of our outperformance year-to-date, we are again raising revenue and free cash flow guidance for the year. And we now expect to finish 2023 ahead of the margin target set at our Analyst Day in August. As we begin to wrap up an outstanding year, I want to spend most of my time today talking about products that we expect will be our primary growth engine going into 2024 and the years to come.

Wix Studio and AI. Like prior quarters, our partners business was a meaningful driver of our strong top line performance in Q3, growing 38% year-over-year. We continue to find successful professionals through ongoing dialogue to better understand their needs and best-in-class product innovation that resonate with the community.

As we spoke about at our Analyst Day in August, we took all that we have learned from partners over the years and created week Studio. Our new cornerstone product for partners, the reception feedback and KPIs has been incredible. The resounding consensus is that still to provide energy with everything they want and more for all of their web creation and project management needs.

Users particularly love studio responsive AI technology that simplify high-touch and time-sensitive tasks such as ensuring consistent design across web pages on different screen sizes. The are also enjoying the AI code assistant inside the new Wix IDE, which allowed them to write clinic code and detect errors easily. More importantly, studio optimized Partners workflow and productivity while elevating their own client offering, ultimately, helping them scale their business.

Features like workflow management, cash board enabled agencies to easily manage all of their clients, projects and teams in one place and client kits allow partners to provide seamless end of experience with built into tutorials for the and client saving time and resources.

We already have thousands of studio sites live and many active generating GPP. The total number of registered studio accounts and conversion of existing sites to Studio have exceeded our own expectations. All of this early sign of success could not have been possible without the team that traveled across 12 cities over 2 months to bring Studio to [indiscernible] for countless educational workshop Q&A forms and onboarding sessions. These 2 will give us the opportunity to hear directly from hundreds of partners around the globe, and it allowed partners to learn from each other.

Wix Studio is now fully live to oil partners. We have a strong team that continues to execute well and a growing community of professionals excited about Wix. These factors are what gives me confidence in the long period of growth ahead in this business. We did not let off the gas in terms of product innovation as we continue to add our own industry-leading AI and GenAI product offering.

As we spoke about at an Analyst Day, we have nearly a decade working with AI and machine learning to reduce friction and enable better creation by leveraging AI for co-creation for our users. Earlier this week, we released our latest AI products, the first was AI Meta Tag Creator, a groundbreaking SEO tool powered by AI and our first AI powerful feature within our collection of SEO tools, both safety areas, looking to generate SEO-friendly site for each of their pages and professionals looking to enhance their efficiency and make real-time adjustments with benefits from this product.

The second was our Conversational AI Chat Experience for Businesses. This feature which is now live, paves the way to accelerate onboarding using AI in order to get businesses online more quickly and efficiently. These new tools continue to demonstrate our leadership in utilizing AI to help users of all types to succeed online. It has been a busy year at Wix still with many products and financial milestones, but we are not done yet. We expect to continue the strong momentum into the fourth quarter and accelerate profitable growth even further.

Finally, before I turn it over to Nir, I'd like to end with a quick thought. The terrorist attack in Israel a month ago was a terrible beyond imagination, but with Wix it is navigated unprecedent challenges before and ultimately a met stronger from them. This world is no different. Even against the current backdrop, I am more confident than ever in the strength of our global team and the execution of our strategy and growth trajectory.

With that, I will hand it over to Nir.

[Nir Zohar, executive]

Thank you, Avishai, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Following the strong performance that we've seen so far this year, I want to revisit the key growth pillars we spoke about at our Analyst Day, which we expect will drive our business in the coming years.

First, as Avishai mentioned, Q3 was another quarter of accelerating growth in Partners revenue. We expect growth in the Partners business to continue with a long runway of opportunity ahead, particularly as Wix Studio ramps. The initial months of Wix Studio has been fantastic with more partners coming to Wix and an increase in projects per partner. We also continue to see partners adopting more business solutions products and driving meaningful growth in GPV.

Combined, these behaviors give us confidence that the compounding growth in Partners' cohorts and revenue will continue. Compounding Partners growth is complemented by reaccelerating growth in our stable and profitable sales creators business, which we saw once again this quarter.

We expect our market-leading product innovation as well as our powerful AI products and technology to drive higher conversion, monetization and retention as we maintain our leadership position in the website building space. Avishai spoke about the AI chat experience for business in its early weeks -- and in its early weeks, we have already seen its positive impact on conversion and revenue. We have more AI products in our pipeline that we believe will continue this trend and I'm confident that our innovation, paired with macro recovery will return our [ self-creators ] business to double-digit growth.

The third pillar of our strategy is Business Solutions growth. We saw outstanding transaction revenue growth in Q3, increasing 22% year-over-year, highlighting higher GPV as well as increased adoption of Wix Payments. We expect continued increases in transaction revenue and GPV as well as better adoption of business applications will drive growth across both partners and [ self-creators ]. This quarter was a continuation of the momentum in growth we experienced in the first half of the year, and it increases our excitement about what's to come in the years ahead.

Finally, I'd like to briefly address our operations amidst the ongoing war in Israel. With all of our employees accounted for and our business continuity plan in place, there has been no disruption to our business and we do not anticipate any significant impact on operations going forward, even as the war continues. As a reminder, all of our infrastructure and internal networks are cloud-based and located completely outside of Israel.

Importantly, our users have not experienced any disruptions to performance or support throughout this period. As we have shared, less than 5% of our global workforce were called up to military duty and we have already implemented contingencies to take on their responsibilities. In the immediate weeks following October 7, as we focused on the well-being of our employees and their families, we experienced slight delays to some product development time lines. In response, we shifted priorities and efforts to successfully mitigate impact on our product pipeline.

We intend for these delays not to impact our overall product development plans. Over the last several weeks, we have successfully launched a number of products, including the full global rollout of Studio as well as our newest AI capabilities. We will continue to introduce new products and features in the coming quarters as planned.

Our people in Israel are obviously adjusting to a new work environment. We are supporting them in any way we can, including with the implementation of a work routine that prioritizes the physical safety and mental well-being of our teams and their families. In addition to supporting our Wix teammates, our global team has implemented multiple initiatives to support our users and broader community during this time as well.

We are leveraging our robust platform, global footprint and technological expertise to connect those in need with vital resources, as small businesses impacted by the war and ensure the reliability of our platform for those who are depending on it the most.

The resiliency of this incredible team along with the support of our community of users and partners, give me confidence in our growth strategy as we all look forward to better times.

With that, I will hand it over to Lior to walk through our financials outlook and progress against our refreshed 3-year plan. Lior?

[Lior Shemesh, executive]

Thanks, Nir. We carried forward our positive momentum into Q3 with another quarter of results that exceeded both growth and profitability expectations. Our exceptional performance year-to-date enable us to increase full year guidance again and provide increased confidence in our ability to achieve and even exceed the milestone in our 3-year plan provided at our Analyst Day in August.

We now expect to exit the year with free cash flow margin of 20% to 21% which is within striking distance of the minimum of 25% free cash flow margin targeted for 2025. Additionally, we also expect to generate more than $3.5 of free cash flow per share in 2023 above the $3 per share anticipated in August. As a result of robust free cash flow generation and careful dilution management throughout the year. Notably, following the second consecutive quarter of positive GAAP net income in Q3, we expect to achieve positive GAAP net income for full year 2023, with GAAP profitability expected to be achievable in 2024 as well.

I'm incredibly proud of this achievement as it puts us ahead of the GAAP target in our 3-year plan.

Moving on to the details of the third quarter. Total revenue of $394 million was up 14% year-over-year and exceeded the top end of our guidance range by $3 million as we continue to execute on our strategic initiatives. Total bookings were $389 million, up 10% year-over-year. Strong top line growth was again driven by our Partners business. Partners revenue grew 38% year-over-year in Q3, marking a third consecutive quarter of accelerating growth. With Partners now contributing to more than 40% of overall GPV, total GPV in Q2 grew 14% year-over-year. This growth in GPV, coupled with an increased take rate as merchants continue to adopt weak payments resulted in transaction revenue growth accelerating to 22% year-over-year this quarter.

Before I move on to profitability, I want to take a move into to highlight our B2B business. After 3 years since the signing of our first partnership, our B2B business has scaled tremendously and is now profitable on a stand-alone basis. Today, we are able to integrate with any large business looking to bring the power of [ rigs ] to their customers without additional meaningful technological investments from our end. As a result of this achievement as well as the uncertain macro environment, we are now able to offer partners space [indiscernible] terms and we no longer recognize unbilled contractual obligation in bookings beyond 12 months. One example of this evolution is our B2B model is a strategic partnership we signed with Intuit earlier this quarter. This partnership represents a significant potential in the future but will be recognized based on usage on an ongoing basis. We believe this shift opens our pipeline to more partnership opportunities going forward.

Moving on now to the profitability improvements made this quarter. Non-GAAP gross margin of 68% was up approximately 280 basis points compared to the prior year quarter. We continue to benefit from a more optimized cost structure as well as better gross margin in our payments business. We generated the fourth consecutive quarter of positive non-GAAP operating income, which was [ 16% ] of revenue. included nonrecurring increases to compensation as well as increased marketing activities associated with Wix Studio, both according to our annual budget.

These increases in operating expense were partially offset by continued execution on our streamlined marketing strategy as well as lower headcount and overhead expenses compared to the prior year quarter. As a result of our continued growth and leaner cost structure, we generated stronger free cash flow than expected this quarter. Free cash flow grew 28% year-over-year to over $62 million or 16% of revenue and accelerates our path to achieving the target in our 3-year plan. Note that this excludes CapEx related to the build-out of our headquarters.

Now I want to finish with our outlook for Q4 and 2023. We expect other revenue in Q4 to be $400 million to $405 million, representing 13% to 14% growth year-over-year. Following our revenue outperformance year-to-date, we are increasing our full year outlook again. We now expect total revenue to be approximately $1.558 billion to $1.563 billion, representing approximately 12% to 13% year-over-year growth, an increase from our previous expectation of 11% to 12% year-over-year growth. We also expect accelerating profitability as we exit 2023. We are increasing our outlook for free cash flow for 2023 to $235 million to $240 million or approximately 15% of revenue.

This indicates and exit free cash flow margin of 20% to 21% this year, putting us much closer to our minimum 25% of free cash flow margin anticipated for 2025. This compares to our previous free cash flow outlook of $200 million to $210 million or approximately 13% of revenue and an exit rate of approximately 15%. This updated free cash flow outlook along with careful dilution management throughout the year also enables us to increase our free cash flow per share target for the year.

Following the incredible performance so far this year, I'm more confident than ever in our ability to achieve our 3-year plan as we accelerate a long expected path to the Rule of 40 with a free cash flow margin target of at least 25% in 2025.

Operator, we are now ready for questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Trevor Young with Barclays.

[Trevor Young, analyst]

Great. First, just any insights on the slight deceleration in bookings, particularly in light of the easier compare. It looks like it deceled both on a reported basis and ex FX.

And then second question, on a geo basis, what drove that market acceleration in Europe and Asia? And what drove the slowdown in North America to partially offset that.

[Lior Shemesh, executive]

So I will answer both of the questions. This is Lior. So with regard to the bookings, it came in where we expected. I think that it's also worth mentioning the B2B partnership, and I spoke about it briefly before. We see actually a very positive changes to this business. As I mentioned before, we completed with products and integration with previous customers, the previous partner.

So we don't have to do it again. It means that it's not necessary for us to demand any kind of commitment from our partners going forward. Also, when you look at the macro environment, people our partners, obviously, are not willing to provide a long-term commitment by the way, as I am not willing to do that with regard to my vendor.

So from now on, we are not going to recognize a multiyear commitment as part of bookings, at least that is more than one year. So it's going to have a kind of a negative effect on bookings short term, but not long term. And -- but it's not going to have any impact on revenue. It's important to mention.

Second reason to your question, we had a slightly higher percentage of monthly plan, partly driven by new subs from B2B partnerships as well as in other specific geographies. Again, there is no impact on revenue, just about the booking.

Third reason, I believe, is from -- because of the fact that, that was the first full quarter of lapping price increase from spring 2022. However, we benefited from compounding growth in [indiscernible] driven by Business Solutions. So it's even kind of more than compensated for that. I believe that going forward, we need to remember that we have not yet benefited from strong growth engines that we have, for example, Studio that we just launched, but also all the AI tools that we already see the contribution in terms of increased conversion, but also increase in revenue.

With regard to the second question about the geo growth. So in the slide of last quarter, we had a mistake, meaning that Europe was not 2%. It was 9%, going up to 11%, this quarter actually accelerating. So that kind of expand part of the confusement that we have in the geo.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Ygal Arounian with Citi.

[Ygal Arounian, analyst]

First of all, best wishes to you guys and families and everyone and hope you guys have been okay and wishing for better times in Israel and the region. I have 2 questions. First, just on the acceleration in Partners and Studio and the impact that's driving there. I think typically, when you guys launch new products, it feels like it takes a little bit more time until you start seeing a more meaningful impact and it's coming through the numbers. Are you seeing it? Has that been a notable driver of the acceleration in third quarter? Or is it really more still the [indiscernible] you're seeing some good early signs, but it's not contributing a lot to the numbers yet.

And then on the AI side, just a follow-up on the comments around driving better conversion. So a lot of new AI products coming through. Can you just expand on that comment on conversion, what you're seeing in the KPIs around conversion, monetization and retention?

[Lior Shemesh, executive]

Yes, so I will start with the first question about Partners. So you're absolutely right. We still don't see a significant impact of Studio because we just launched it. I think that this is why we are so excited about it.

The entire growths that we see right now are coming from our previous products and everything that we've done with Partners, including Editor X, not necessarily Studio. And we need to remember that we still see the compounding effect of it, meaning that any agency that [indiscernible] like a few quarters ago, we see the benefit of it right now, buying more and using more payments, for example, or Google ads. So we see a tremendous increase in business solutions. A big part of it is because of partners. The reason why we are so excited because we believe that Studio is a great engine for us to continue and increase growth for Partners in the future. We are going to see some of it next year.

[Avishai Abrahami, executive]

I believe your second question was in regards to what kind of effect we are seeing from different AI products that we are launching, and mostly in regards to improvement in conversion. And we do actually see an improvement in conversion, which is probably the most important KPI by which we measure our success in deploying new products.

The reason for that is that with AI, we are able to ask the user better questions and to understand in a smarter way, why is that the user is trying to achieve. From that, we are able to generate a better starting point for their business on top of Wix. And that is not just the skeleton, we are also able to fill in a lot of information a lot of the content that the user would normally have to fill in manually. The result is that the amount of effort and knowledge that you need to create a website and for your business on Wix is dramatically reduced. And from that, we are able to see very good results in terms of improvement of conversion.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Andrew Boone of JMP Securities.

[Andrew Boone, analyst]

We as well are also [indiscernible] back you guys. I wanted to tie back the comment of [ self-creators ] growth returning to double-digit with sales and marketing going forward. Historically, you guys have had a very strong framework between those two items. And so can you just talk about how we should expect your marketing and performance marketing specifically to either ramp as we think about [ self-creators ] Getting back to double-digit growth or anything else you want to unpack there?

[Lior Shemesh, executive]

Andrew, so this is Lior. So I believe that looking at the history of Wix almost the entire growth that we managed to deliver in the past was due to products. Obviously, Avishai mentioned, for example, the AI tools that we just launched, and we see a tremendous increase and potential upside for the future to be more specific about conversion, for example. We also see a much bigger usage of our business solution tools like Payments, for example.

So looking at everything and including and hopefully, the market and the macro recovery in the future, we do believe that we will be able to gain a double-digit growth for [ self-creators ].

[Andrew Boone, analyst]

Great. And then I just wanted to touch on gross profit margins. Can you just help us unpack the improvement there? And how do we think about that going forward? Any change from [ analyst deck ]?

[Lior Shemesh, executive]

So yes, certainly. So we saw this year a tremendous improvement in margins in gross margin. And it came mostly from two places. The first one is a lot of improvements and savings that we have with our infrastructure, most of you know the hosting activity. So we had a lot of savings over there, but also about our [ care ] organization, for example, benefiting from all kind of AI tools that enable us to be more efficient.

So I believe that, that was most of the improvement that we've seen this year. I believe that next year, we are going to see some more improvement. I don't -- I'm not sure that it will be drastic as this year, but we're certainly going to see more improvement especially around being more efficient, but also from the fact that we see a much better gross margin coming from the Business Solutions. For example, Payments as take rate is increasing, we are able to generate more margins out of transaction revenue. I believe that this is something that will continue also next year and will drive gross margins up again next year.

The question was just about the gross margin or the overall profitability, for example, the operating expenses?

[Andrew Boone, analyst]

I was going to keep it to gross profit margin. I'll let somebody else.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Chris Zhang with UBS.

[Unknown Analyst]

So I have the first question regarding the marketing expense this year. You lowered the guide for the [indiscernible] by about 200 basis points as a percentage of revenue. Can you maybe unpack the drivers of the reduction, how much from the more direct response channels, how much from the Partner spend that you previously expect to go up? And also, can you talk about the return environment right now on the acquisition marketing as one of your competitors mentioned leaning more into the more direct channels to Partners spend.

[Nir Zohar, executive]

Chris, it's Nir. I think I'll kick this off and Lior can go into maybe a little more of the financial aspects if needed. But Generally, already last year, we communicated our change in marketing strategy, strategy that worked extremely well for us. We leverage the strength of our brand against buying transit understanding that we can get better ROI simply because the brand is compensating because it strengthened so much throughout the last few years.

So this year, we communicated continuing this strategy, but also basically deploying a lot of marketing dollars towards the release and the launch of Wix Studio. Now we explained and we put most of that spend in the second half of the year. But if you remember when we share the kind of the cadence of the release of Wix Studio, Q3 was about mainly about an internal launch. So we were launching to our existing partners. And therefore, we didn't need to spend and to use most of the marketing budget. So the plan was always to put more of its use in Q4. Even Q3, by the way, within the plan of the internal -- the internal plan, we managed to create some savings, which was great. But the goal was to put more of it towards Q4.

That being said, looking at the first few weeks of the launch of Studio, the adoption is fantastic. It's higher than we even expected. So we believe that the actual deployment of the marketing dollars will be done more gradually between Q4 and heading into 2024.

[Unknown Analyst]

That's super helpful. And I guess if you can also comment on the return environment. And I think that's also kind of related to the [ self-creators ] growth trajectory and how you're thinking about probably just putting some dollars in -- or incremental dollars in the acquisition marketing?

[Lior Shemesh, executive]

So with regard to the [ self-creators ], there's not much of a change from the last quarter. And I think that we show that the change that we've made is a consistent and stable. We managed to generate, obviously, the same amount of collection with less investment in marketing. And I think that it's great to see that this strategy is actually working due to the fact that the brand become much, much stronger. Right now, you know the return obviously has changed dramatically than compared to the beginning of last year, [indiscernible] less than 1 quarter. I believe that we see the strength of our brand. We believe that this is something that can continue and sustain also over the next couple of years. So we do not see any significant change over there for [ self-creators ].

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Bernie McTernan of Needham & Company.

[Bernard McTernan, analyst]

Great just reiterating thoughts and prayers with you guys and the Wix team. Maybe just on [ self creator ], talking about getting back to double-digit growth. How much of that can you control versus waiting on the macro, anything that you can call out like technology or maybe even just marketing wise to -- that you control to get that growth back to double digits?

[Nir Zohar, executive]

Bernie, it's Nir. So I think on the [ self-creators ], obviously, macro environment is something we cannot control, and we don't anticipate to control. But we do believe that a lot of our product innovation is towards generating that growth in any environment. And obviously, if there's a recovery that can be even a plus to that growth.

From what we've seen already, first and foremost, I think that the AI innovation that we are aiming for, and Avishai Abrahami just explained how does the AI drives conversion. And we have -- this is the first milestone or first part of a much deeper and wide product around AI and the creation for [ self-creators ] that we plan. obviously, that improvement in conversion is -- can be a big driver for growth and marketing is something that follows product.

So if the conversion improves, then obviously, we can consider what more we want to do in terms of the marketing towards [ self-creators ]. But from that standpoint alone, we think there's a significant potential for growth. The other side of it is the Business Solutions, okay? The Business Solutions, although they're growing much faster on the partner side, they are also growing significantly on the, [ self-creator ] side. And we've seen that both on the side of GPV and growth and adoption of selling and eCommerce platforms, whether it's stores or scheduling or restaurants or hotels and we have or events, and we have a very wide variety, which is part of -- a big part of our strength.

So the GPV growth is definitely a driver there as well as other solutions that are more business solutions, e-mail marketing, Google advertising, et cetera. So our belief is, yes, we can drive it. That's in our control, and hopefully, recovery will come on top of it.

[Bernard McTernan, analyst]

Understood. And then just to follow up on Wix Studio. I know it's really early days, but adoption higher than expected. Anything you can comment just in terms of like tangibly what you're seeing, whether it's the partners being more efficient? Or do you think you're taking share of their workload, just would love just to get some more tangible in terms of just like exactly what's happening as the adoption occurs in Wix Studio.

[Avishai Abrahami, executive]

Well, I think that -- there is a variety. There are many different kinds of partners that are using Wix Studio. And I think that when you look at more of the freelancers of the people that do it part time. Then it is just a more familiar using Wix Studio. It is very similar to a lot of design software.

So traditional design software seasons that it's very easy for you to adopt to Wix Studio. And then because of the power of the AI tools, it can create very strong, very professional websites because the AI will continue and finish for you the thing that would normally require to specialize in different variations of web designs.

In the case of the more professional companies, where the -- what we're seeing is that the way we built it is that we enable you to finish things very quickly, in kind of a sketch mode and then take that sketch mode and make it into a real live website while having the ability to go really below the hood into the CSS into the code and change it to the exact specification that you want.

What it means, overall, in terms of operation, we serve a tremendous amount of time. We can do things that beyond for that would require to hire very expensive people to do the specific things. And then so the overall thing, right, is the increased efficiency while even going into making better projects. So we're seeing different values to different kind of partners, of course.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Ken Wong with Oppenheimer & Company.

[Unknown Analyst]

Avishai, I wanted to touch on the Intuit [ MailChimp ] agreement. I think the earlier press releases seemed to lean largely towards utilizing their CRM, their marketing tools. You mentioned it's a bilateral agreement. Can you help us understand kind of how much of a commitment there is to potentially using the Wix website builder. And then just following up on the shift to kind of shorter duration B2B deals, mean should we assume the same level of exclusivity with these partners going forward? Yes, any comments on those two would be great.

[Nir Zohar, executive]

Ken, it's Nir. I'll tackle the first Intuit question and then hand it over to Lior. So I think in terms of what we intend to do together on the Mailchimp side and maybe other -- also other functions on the Intuit portfolio. First, I think it's -- what's very interesting for us is from the conversations we've had with their fantastic team over the last few quarters. It's very clear that there's a lot of overlap in terms of the profile of the Wix users and the Intuit users, but very little overlap in terms of the offering, meaning that we are complementing each other in many ways and in many different places.

The idea is for us is to map these spaces and start hooking up the user flow in a way that will be as seamless as possible for the end customer, but we'll be able to deliver the core values of Wix and the core value of Intuit of [ Mailchimps ] to the best possible way and the best possible experience for the end customer.

It means from our standpoint that eventually we will have better product offering, where they are spending a lot of effort and we're not. And they'll have better -- much better offering on the digital presence and the creation tools that where we are spending a lot and they're not. And the combined upside will be a very healthy experience for the end user who will be willing to pay for more services. So our hope is we're going to generate something here, which is a win-win-win Intuit, Wix and the, obviously, and most importantly, the customers and the users. Lior, you want to take the B2B?

[Lior Shemesh, executive]

Yes, sure. So Ken, to your question, there is no change in the type of the arrangements, meaning that if we have exclusivity, it will remain exclusive. I believe that the only change is about the fact that we will not recognize a booking anything that is beyond 1 year. I believe that it's, first of all, more conservative. Second, there's no need. I believe that we have the best product right now in the market to serve partners. They want to bring the power of Wix to their customers. And we are the best alternative in order to do that. I think that it's also saving them R&D cash, R&D money and provide them with the best solution.

So this is something that will continue. The second reason, obviously, why it doesn't make sense to recognize as booking any commitment that is longer than one year is because of the lumpiness of this business. You can have a huge agreement in one quarter. The other -- the following quarters, there's no other -- no huge agreement. So it's kind of making this business kind of lumpy between the quarter, and it doesn't make sense.

And in any case, it doesn't involve any impact on revenue. So I believe that, that would be the best decision. And secondly, it's open more larger town for us because then you don't negotiate on the commitment, you negotiate on the assets on what is more important in order to make this partnership successful.

[Operator]

Our final question will come from Mark Zgutowicz with the Benchmark Company.

[Mark Zgutowicz, analyst]

Just a follow-up on the gross margin question. Just curious how much more run rate you have over the next 12 months on customer care leverage there. How meaningful that's been in terms of driving gross margin leverage versus other lever points like hosting efficiencies?

And then second question, just curious how meaningful was the BB partnership contribution to 3Q Partners revenue and any expectations as you look at into '24 in that regard?

[Lior Shemesh, executive]

So I'll start with the first question. I'm not going to provide details about how more efficient we can be with [indiscernible]. It's always the case by the way. We also look for more ways to be and more needs to be more efficient. I did mention that we are going to see some contribution and some more efficiency around gross margin next year, but it can be also from the fact that we are more efficient in payments. We are more profitable in payments as we scale up this business.

And obviously, there will be more cases where we can drive efficiency. So of course, we are going to do that, but I'm not going to go into the details of it.

With regard to the contribution of Partners of the B2B partnership for this year. So of course, it was more significant than last year. And it's a SaaS business as any other SaaS business. So it will be more significant in the following years. This is like the nature of it. But I must say that most of the improvement that we see in our Partners Business actually coming from the fact that we are getting more and more agencies. I did mention many times in the past that we see that as like the most -- the strongest growth driver that we have. It's mostly coming from more and more agencies joining Wix and the compounding effect of it.

[Operator]

This concludes the question-and-answer session. Thank you for participating in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.