Lightspeed Commerce Inc

TSX:LSPD

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q3

[Operator]

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Lightspeed Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Gus Papageorgiou. Thank you. Please go ahead.

[Gus Papageorgiou]

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Lightspeed's Fiscal Third Quarter 2021 Conference Call. Joining me today are Dax Dasilva, Lightspeed's Founder and CEO; Brandon Nussey, Chief Financial Officer; and JP Chauvet, President of Lightspeed. After prepared remarks, we will open it up for your questions. We will make forward-looking statements on our call today that are based on assumptions and therefore, subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. We undertake no obligation to update these statements, except as required by law. You can read about these risks and uncertainties in our earnings press release issued earlier today as well as in our filings with U.S. and Canadian securities regulators. Also, our commentary today will include adjusted financial measures, which are non-IFRS measures. These should be considered as a supplement to and not a substitute for IFRS financial measures. Reconciliations between the 2 can be found in our earnings press release, which is available on our website, on sedar.com and on the SEC's EDGAR system. In addition, our commentary today will include key performance indicators that help us evaluate our business, measure our performance, identify trends affecting our business, formulate business plans and make strategic decisions. Such key performance indicators may be calculated in a manner different than similar key performance indicators used by other companies. And finally, note that because we report in U.S. dollars, all amounts discussed today are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise indicated. With that, I will now turn the call over to Dax.

[Dax Dasilva, Founder, CEO & Corporate Director]

Thank you, Gus, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this morning. Lightspeed had another strong quarter as we continue to support the efforts of our customers to adopt the omnichannel strategies that are helping them navigate the global pandemic and position themselves for eventual recovery. Thanks to the dedication and tenacity of our remarkably committed employees, a solid and ever-improving product offering, our global footprint and the success of service offerings such as Payments, Lightspeed was able to deliver stronger-than-expected results. In addition, we were also able to complete 2 major acquisitions and accelerate our innovation initiatives. At times, the pressure on our people has been noticeable with our employees pushing themselves to the limit in order to deliver new solutions aimed at helping our customers. Despite this pressure, our employees have risen to the challenge, and I could not be prouder of them. I believe that their strong dedication is largely due to the fact that we, as an organization, deeply believe in our mission as a company. Lightspeed was founded on the belief that the resilience of the entrepreneurial spirit of small and medium-sized businesses is fundamental to maintaining vibrant cities and communities. As difficult as the current situation has been, we know that it has been that much harder on our customers. We are proud to be the technology partner of choice for nearly 115,000 customer locations globally as they reinvent their business models and embrace our cloud-based platform. Notable customer wins in the quarter included Group [indiscernible] with hotel, restaurant and spa properties in Lyon, France; Ski Banff, a legendary Canadian ski resort, where we will be supporting their 4 existing retail shops with plans for 3 more to open shortly; and Lan Kwai Fong Group, a household name in Asia with 21 restaurants and hotels in Hong Kong. Our team's dedication continues to pay off for our customers and investors in Q3 as Lightspeed on a year-over-year basis delivered revenue growth of 79%, relocations by 74% and expanded GTV by 48%. Although the addition of Upserve and ShopKeep boosted our performance for the quarter, even without their contribution, Lightspeed delivered revenue ahead of our previously established guidance and reached Software and Payments organic revenue growth of 47% year-over-year, accelerating from the 42% we saw last quarter. We had a very busy quarter, but I want to highlight some key themes: the continued success of Payments, the official launch of our Supplier Network, the completion and planned integration of our latest acquisitions and finally, a view into what a post-COVID world can look like for Lightspeed. Payments had another stellar quarter with year-over-year revenue up almost 4x the levels of the same quarter last year. Adoption of our Payments offering amongst our customer base is growing rapidly, both in terms of the number of customer locations and the proportion of GTV. Payments remains a priority for us, and we expect to have the offering rolled out in all of our key geographies, including the U.K., Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France in calendar 2021. Payments is a highly compelling service offering for our company. We can simultaneously increase the long-term value of our customers and further entrench Lightspeed into their operations. It can also act as a gateway to other financial services, such as Capital. And although we have seen great success so far, the proportion of our total GTV that flows through Payments is still in the single-digit percent range and as such, we have a long runway and sizable opportunity ahead of us. In mid-January, we announced the initial availability of the Lightspeed Supplier Network. I'm very excited about this initiative. We believe it will revolutionize how SMB's order and manage inventory interact with their suppliers, populate their e-commerce sites and eventually pay invoices. This is a product years in the making that places our independent merchants on the same strategic footing as enterprise retailers and e-commerce giants and a offering that truly speaks to our mission as a company. The Supplier Network will eliminate the time-consuming and frustrating experience of managing multiple B2B supplier portals, allow SMBs to more easily discover new products, keep merchants up-to-date on the latest product offerings and inventory levels and allow them to import high-resolution images directly from their suppliers onto their own Lightspeed-powered e-commerce sites. In short, for our SMB customers, the Supplier Network offers a seamless supply chain that will save them time and frustration and hopefully help increase sales through better inventory management and e-commerce capabilities. But the benefits of this initiative are not only limited to our existing customers. In order to create a network effect, we need to offer value to all the participants in this ecosystem. In launch, we had signed over 100 suppliers to the network in key verticals. The motivation for these suppliers to join the network is clear. Not only does it simplify product discovery and ordering for their customers, it also provides them with real-time sell-through data. The benefits of this data should not be underestimated as suppliers can now see, almost instantly, what products are selling at what prices and where. This data should grant them far superior supply chain agility, ensuring that they are manufacturing the products that consumers are demanding so that they can maximize their revenue and profitability while minimizing working capital requirements. I know many of you have been asking how we plan to monetize this initiative. For now, access to the Supplier Network is free for our customers, and that is unlikely to change, but it is already having an impact. For example, it is already helping to generate new customer leads as suppliers are recommending the Lightspeed solution as the system of choice. However, we are also developing plans to further capitalize on this initiative in ways that we believe will minimize the overall cost of sourcing, ordering and paying for products for our SMB customers and their suppliers. Connecting SMBs directly to their suppliers is one way Lightspeed's innovative offerings can help level the playing field for our customers, but we also want to help them connect to consumers who spend much of their time searching for products online. Part of the challenges our customers have is displaying real-time inventory within search engine results and delivering high-resolution images for those searches. These are issues that large retailers have already solved but are still lacking for SMBs. Supplier Network will solve the issue of high-resolution images. And in the months ahead, we hope to deliver solutions that will display real-time inventory availability by location within popular search engines. We think this will go a long way in helping level the playing field for our SMB customers and highly differentiate the Lightspeed offering. Moving on to our recent acquisitions of ShopKeep and Upserve. Now that the acquisitions are complete, the teams are actively integrating into our operations and sharing best practices. As we mentioned before, ShopKeep maintained an advanced capital business, and we are working with that team to help develop the road map for Lightspeed Capital. With Upserve, we are actively looking to integrate their advanced hospitality analytics solution into the broader Lightspeed platform. On our M&A strategy, I want to make certain things clear. Firstly, Lightspeed looks at companies that have similar operations to our own, that is they are cloud-based, have similar go-to-market approaches and are well run. Because they share a similar approach and structure, integrating these companies into our operations is considerably easier. Given that we have some experience here, I believe we are developing an expertise in integrating acquisitions. Secondly, I want to make clear that we have no interest in maintaining a portfolio of brands and solutions. The goal is to integrate all of our acquisitions and be in market with one Lightspeed solution for retail and one for hospitality, all under one Lightspeed brand. The pace at which we integrate the acquisitions will vary depending on several factors, but for ShopKeep and Upserve, the integration is well underway, with operations expected to be fully integrated by April and product by end of summer. Finally, our approach to M&A is to look for companies that can expand or solidify our geographic footprint, such as Gastrofix, Upserve and ShopKeep; takes us into compelling verticals such as Chronogolf; or advance our technology offering. These 3 goals, market expansion, vertical expansion and technology, will continue to drive our strategy going forward. Before I end, I want to discuss our prospects as we eventually put COVID in our rearview mirror. In the immediate term, things remain challenging as lockdowns remain in place and, in some circumstances, are worsening, which negatively impacts our GTV churn and new customer additions. But our global footprint allows us, we believe, a greater degree of visibility into the potential of a recovery. If we look at markets with limited COVID restrictions in place, such as Australia, where they recently reopened the Sydney Opera House, we see very promising signs. Our overall hospitality business saw declines in GTV this quarter, but in Australia, we saw double-digit growth. Overall, Australia had the best quarter it has ever had. There are 2 main influences behind these strong results. The first is the positive impact from ending lockdowns and allowing consumers to flock back to restaurants, bars and retail. But the second is the ongoing migration of these small businesses from legacy to cloud-based commerce solutions. COVID is highlighting that cloud-based commerce solutions have moved from being a nice to have to an absolute necessity. We believe we will see similar trends in Europe and North America once vaccines are distributed and these markets emerge from the shadow of COVID. We cannot know how long the pandemic will continue to impact us, but we are optimistic, not only about our prospects in an eventual recovery, but the role our resilient merchants will play in driving a reopening economy. Finally, before I pass it over to Brandon, I want to highlight the addition of Manon Brouillette to our Board of Directors. Manon brings solid strategic and operational experience with her as the former CEO of Videotron and is also an experienced Board member. Her addition clearly strengthens our Board, and I look forward to working with her. And now I will pass it over to Brandon.

[Brandon Blair Nussey, Chief Financial Officer]

Thanks, Dax. Today, we reported another terrific quarter, once again, in a very challenging macro environment. Given the many moving pieces this quarter as the result of our recent acquisitions, I encourage you to refer to our investor presentation on our website, our MD&A as well as the appendix of our press release, where we have added several summary charts to show a more normalized view of certain figures. All told, as you'll see, we had a great quarter across the board. The strength of the quarter was led by the 4 primary drivers of our business model. First, continued growth of our customer base, which, as you've have heard, is now just under 115,000 total locations at December 31. We saw another strong quarter of organic customer location adds, which I believe is one of the most important metrics for us. Second, ARPU expansion. As we grow our customer base, our land-and-expand strategy kicks in, and we saw continued success there. ARPU for the quarter was our highest ever as more and more customers adopt a broader portion of the solution set. Third, Lightspeed Payments with $29 billion in overall GTV, we have a tremendous opportunity for Lightspeed Payments. The number of customers contracting for payments alongside their core subscription were an all-time high this quarter. And lastly, acquisitions. We believe that smart acquisitions will accelerate our leadership position and unlock many revenue, expense and technology synergies. Our past acquisitions have proven to be highly successful, and our recent acquisitions of ShopKeep and Upserve are landmark deals that significantly alter our scale and market presence. We believe all 4 of these drivers have substantial runway still ahead of us. Our market is large, fragmented, and we're working hard to build a category leader.It's worth noting at this point that challenging macroeconomic factors continue to face us. Increased lockdown measures in many of our core markets have muted new customer adds, reduced our customers' GTV and led to higher churn in our customer base. Fortunately, the growth drivers of the business have more than offset these headwinds to date. But as I will speak to later, we will continue to take a cautious stance on our near-term financial results. For the longer term, though, our optimism continues to grow, and today's results reinforce that. Looking at the quarter in more detail. Total revenues of $57.6 million were up 79% year-over-year and were $49.3 million when excluding the recent acquisitions of ShopKeep and Upserve. This exceeded our previously issued guidance of $44 million to $47 million. Software and Payments revenue represented 91% of total revenue in the quarter at $52.5 million, which was up 85% year-over-year. Excluding the impact of all acquisitions that were not in the company's results from a year ago, Software and Payments revenue grew 47% compared to that same quarter a year ago, an increase from 42% growth reported last quarter. Adjusted EBITDA loss for the quarter was $6.6 million compared to $5.2 million loss from a year ago. As a percentage of revenue, EBITDA loss was 11%, a 5 percentage point improvement from 16% a year ago as we continue to see the leverage of the business model even while investing for growth. This quarter, we are introducing an adjusted net loss and adjusted net loss per share metric to further align our investor community on a net income loss measure that excludes the impact of acquisition accounting and stock-based compensation, which is largely noncash in nature. The adjusted net loss for the quarter was $7.1 million or $0.06 a share, up from a loss of $5.9 million a year ago. You'll find a summary table of the calculations for both adjusted EBITDA and adjusted net loss in our press release, MD&A and investor presentation on our website.We ended the quarter very well capitalized with unrestricted cash on hand of over $230 million. We have also shown an adjusted cash from operations metric in our press release, MD&A and investor presentation to give a more normalized view of the cash flow of the ongoing business. This metric primarily adjusts for the impact of transaction-related expenses and liabilities retained at closing from our recent acquisitions that would otherwise have been cash earmarked for the sellers. For accounting purposes, settlement of these retained liabilities shows up as operating cash flow despite this being a downward adjustment to the amounts we paid to sellers on these transactions. Adjusted cash flow from operations was negative $19 million in the quarter. This figure includes a payment for D&O insurance of approximately $10 million on the back of our recent NYSE listing. When excluding that, adjusted cash flow from operations was negative $9.3 million as compared to negative $7.9 million a year ago. While we are acquisitive, I expect there continue to be a lack of consistency coming through in our financials associated with the accounting treatment of the components of our purchase price, and I'm hopeful that some of this incremental disclosure will help normalize some of these accounting conclusions. Looking deeper at some of the specific business trends we saw in the quarter. As I mentioned earlier, customer locations grew to 115,000 in total. Excluding ShopKeep and Upserve, our customer locations were almost 84,000 at December 31, up from 80,000 3 months earlier. This growth was achieved despite the ongoing impacts of the pandemic and various lockdown restrictions in our markets around the world, and I view this as highly encouraging progress. Also, as mentioned, overall GTV grew 48% versus the same quarter a year ago and 29% when excluding ShopKeep and Upserve. Within this, we continue to see strength from our retail customers, where overall retail GTV grew 41% versus the prior year. Retail GTV was aided by continued success of e-commerce, where GTV was up by approximately 100% versus the prior year. After a recovery last quarter, our hospitality GTV showed weakness in the quarter as government lockdowns returned to many of our markets around the world. Overall, organic hospitality GTV fell by 19% in the quarter largely owing to a soft December. Last but not least, Payments continues to be an outstanding performer for us. We now are processing 15% of U.S. retail GTV with Lightspeed Payments and more than 10% of Canadian GTV and retail, with our U.S. Restaurant Payments business still in early stages. I view this as great progress, but we have so much runway still to go, not only in existing markets, but with Europe and Australia approaching launch later this calendar year. So turning now to our Q4 outlook. The performance achieved in Q3 leaves us very confident in our business in the long term. However, our near-term outlook reflects the realities we are now facing in the core markets where government lockdowns, many of which are as restrictive as they were in the spring, are once again impacting our end markets. We expect that these lockdowns will increase customer churn, will impact purchase decisions by our prospects and will affect our customers' transaction volumes. We've seen the softness in our hospitality segment continue into January as our customers deal with these government restrictions. Our outlook also incorporates the seasonal impact in our business. January and February, in particular, are slow months in retail and hospitality even in normal years. And we expect this year to be worsened by the lockdowns around the world. These drivers of lower volumes are a larger portion of the revenue now given the acquisitions of ShopKeep and Upserve, along with our own ongoing success of Lightspeed Payments. So with all that in mind, we expect Q4 revenue in the range of $68 million to $70 million. This represents growth of approximately 90% from a year ago. We expect Q4 EBITDA to be a loss of approximately $12 million to $14 million. This estimate reflects the seasonally weak quarter on customer volumes, a cautious stance on the impacts of COVID-19 lockdowns and the ongoing weakness of the U.S. dollar compared to the Canadian dollar, which is leading to higher overall expenses. So while we will continue to take a cautious view of the near-term results, given the many uncertainties right now, we feel very good about the company's position for the long term. This quarter's results once again demonstrate the power of the business model. And with that, we'll turn it back to the operator for your questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] And your first question here comes from the line of Richard Tse from National Bank Financial.

[Richard Tse, MD & Technology Analyst]

So as we look on the other side of this pandemic, what would you say is sort of the most locking or most demand of these incremental services you've added lately, Capital, for instance? I'm kind of just curious to see what the uptake currently is across that base for these services?

[Jean-Paul Chauvet]

Yes. Maybe I'll start with this one [indiscernible]. So I think really, nothing has changed. Overall, we're hearing a ton of demand for omnichannel. And as we said many times, our customers went from requesting a point solution for their stores and their restaurants and now there's a ton of demand for omnichannel. The second thing we're seeing a lot of is Payments. We are bundling more and more Payments with our software and our core offering. This is creating a lot of demand. And as you know, we've launched Capital and Capital now is ramping up, and we're seeing a lot of demand for that also.

[Richard Tse, MD & Technology Analyst]

Okay. And then the Supplier Network sounds like a pretty interesting development. Can you maybe share with us some of that early feedback from the current base? And are you going to be targeting specific markets to start off with? Or are you just going to pretty much try to take it broad across the base here?

[Jean-Paul Chauvet]

Yes. So we're very bullish about suppliers. We think this is a very big differentiator for us in the market. As you understand, what suppliers enables us to do is to really completely integrate the ordering process and the supply, preparation of the catalogs inside of Lightspeed, and it really creates this incredible flywheel of value between suppliers, stores and consumers. As you know, we -- the first test case we had was on bikes, and that proved to be very good for us. And when we look at metrics and data on bikes, what's interesting is everybody within the ecosystem is recommending Lightspeed. So it has a really good impact on cost of acquisition and lifetime value of customers. We're going to -- we've now launched this as a real product and service. So that means now we can have all of the suppliers within the vertical that makes sense for us fully integrate their catalogs and their supply levels to Lightspeed. And we already have 100 suppliers now on the platform, and we're going to be focusing on the core verticals where Lightspeed has a lot of customers and penetration. And as we go into the year, we'll be expanding to others, but there's a few verticals right now that we are focusing on, and those are the verticals where we have the highest concentration.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Raimo Lenschow with Barclays.

[Raimo Lenschow, MD & Analyst]

Congrats from me on these amazing numbers. Can I stay on that Supplier Network, please, Dax? The -- so if you look -- I mean, there are some guys out there that have kind of created these networks like Ariba and Coupa more on the supply cleanup -- procurement side. Do I need to think about this like that, that you just kind of basically, you centralize all the whole thing? And then the second question is, like, there was always a big debate about how to how to monetize that, and Ariba and Coupa had like very different views of how to monetize it. How do you think about that? That's on the supplier side. And then the second question I had was on the reopening. If you look at Australia and compare the run rate post-COVID versus pre-COVID, has there been any learning, any experience that you can share so far as we're looking out through this year with vaccinations getting better and everyone else kind of opening up as well?

[Dax Dasilva, Founder, CEO & Corporate Director]

I'll take the first question and JP will take the second. So regarding Supplier Network, I think the big advantage here is you have this -- your opening discoverability for suppliers right within the POS system. So it's not a separate system, another set of B2B portals. We're combining all of that functionality directly into Lightspeed and connecting more than 100 suppliers today, and we hope to expand that rapidly in the future. And so it's an integral part of the system where they're already managing inventory and they're already managing their e-commerce assets in site. So that I think is a huge advantage here. And I think that the big benefit to us is that eventually, that we're going to be the system of choice. Suppliers are already recommending Lightspeed to their independent -- to the independent merchants that sell their goods because they're going to -- over time, they'll have aggregate real-time selling data. So there's benefits for the suppliers, in that regard, there's benefits for the stores. And of course, the benefit for us is we become the system of choice. And eventually, there will be other opportunities for us to facilitate B2B invoices, et cetera.

[Raimo Lenschow, MD & Analyst]

Yes. Okay. Yes, makes sense.

[Dax Dasilva, Founder, CEO & Corporate Director]

And JP, regarding Australia?

[Operator]

Your next question here comes from the line of Andrew Jeffrey from Truist.

[Andrew William Jeffrey, Director]

I also have a reopening question. I wonder about sort of your views of net growth and mix. And I guess what I'm thinking about is, you mentioned e-comm doubled this quarter. You're seeing good uptake in some relatively protected verticals like golf as well as Australia. Are there any trade-offs as hospitality comes back and consumers return perhaps more to card present? Or is reopening a net positive any way we look at it?

[Brandon Blair Nussey, Chief Financial Officer]

I'll take that one. Yes, I think it's a net positive any way we look at it. What we're seeing is in Australia, I think we mentioned best quarter ever to get back to Raimo's question. We saw hospitality decline, obviously, in many of our markets, but we saw that segment come back, and that led to just a wonderful quarter in terms of new customer additions and revenue growth for our business there. I think the reopening process not only drives better volumes across the board, which will help in our ongoing rollout of payments, it just spurs new business creation as well, I think. And as you well know, with the majority of this market in legacy systems, the more new business creation we think is only beneficial to Lightspeed, given our position as a modern cloud advanced platform here. So we see nothing but positives, and we really look forward to the year ahead.

[Andrew William Jeffrey, Director]

Okay. That's helpful. And just as a quick follow-up, obviously, the value proposition that Lightspeed brings is stark compared to legacy providers. I assume there's still some merchants that are reluctant to do a rip and replace at any time, let alone during a pandemic. Are you seeing any changes in merchants' willingness to perhaps take the leap and move to a cloud solution? Just sort of culturally in the market have attitudes changed?

[Jean-Paul Chauvet]

Yes. I'll take this one. So I think it's a very good question, and I think that's why we're very excited about the post-pandemic world. I think we're seeing quite the opposite. So think about someone who has the legacy system, and now the majority of their business, if I'm a restaurant that's going to be online, it's going to be through delivery platform, it's going to be through Order Ahead. And if you don't have a platform like Lightspeed, you're basically stuck with silos and trying to manage a ton of different applications. So the view here is that it's become way more complex for the traditional platforms to operate. And actually, we're seeing more demand from actually more established vendors who maybe would have never moved and now are looking at this, and they understand that they have to do something about it. So I think that's why we're very excited about the next few years because the harsh reality is the majority of the platforms on the market are still legacy systems. They're completely underserving their merchants. And then there are platforms like Lightspeed that integrate everything and make it much easier for our customers, and we're seeing a ton of demand there.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Thanos Moschopoulos from BMO Capital Markets.

[Thanos Moschopoulos, VP & Analyst]

In terms of the current weakness you're seeing in hospitality where there have been more lockdowns, maybe just qualitatively, can you characterize it? Is it similar to what you're seeing, kind of, say, back in April? Or is it any different this time around maybe because of survivorship bias? Have you gone back to implementing any cost-containment plans or not this time around?

[Brandon Blair Nussey, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. It does -- to me Thanos, it does feel different this time around. Certainly, in-person dining is suffering as hard as it was in March. I think the difference now is our customers have adapted. Those that have taken advantage of things like Order Ahead and home delivery have those business models in play. I think from our standpoint, we feel better instrumented to know what to expect going through this and the things we can do to help customers. Certainly, if you go back to March, April when this first started, there's a whole lot of uncertainty and unknown. And we do feel differently about it this go around that we have better visibility and know more what to expect, and just by virtue of that, in a position to give the guidance that we gave this quarter.

[Thanos Moschopoulos, VP & Analyst]

Okay. And then with respect to ShopKeep and Upserve, I realize it's maybe still early days. But now that you've owned the assets for a few weeks, can you update us on your thinking as far as the Lightspeed Payments opportunity within those customer bases and maybe the time frame for being able to start to capture some of that?

[Brandon Blair Nussey, Chief Financial Officer]

Well underway. It was -- that was up near the top of the to-do list, for sure. And teams from both of those businesses are actively working on that rollout now. So we're optimistic. Those teams have settled in nicely and already driving significant value into Lightspeed. So all good so far.

[Jean-Paul Chauvet]

Yes. And maybe, Brandon, just to add. By the end of April, we will have the go-to-market teams fully integrated and focusing on selling one product. And the goal is also by the end of summer, we will have Upserve's advanced analytics platform fully integrated with our restaurants and with one product going to market in the U.S. So very happy with the progress there.

[Operator]

Your next question here comes from the line of Daniel Chan from TD Securities.

[Daniel Chan, Research Analyst]

Just a question on the Supplier Network. With the Anheuser-Busch relationship, you did announce that they would be devoting some resources to selling your product. Are these new suppliers that you're onboarding now also committing any resources to this engagement?

[Jean-Paul Chauvet]

Yes. So super excited. It's -- all the contracts that we are putting in place in the context of the suppliers are -- have exactly the same logic. So as you know, there's benefits for the suppliers and then there are benefits for the stores. And so the value proposition here is for suppliers to see sell-through. So as soon as you've connected your catalogs and your inventory to Lightspeed, what we will do is for the stores that are ordering directly in Lightspeed, we will give you the sell-through, which is very unique in small business. And vice versa, we enable all of the stores to actually see -- have visibility on inventory levels at the supplier. So -- and that whole relationship is really around basically suppliers and stores promoting Lightspeed within their network.

[Daniel Chan, Research Analyst]

Okay. And what are some metrics that you're tracking to help guide you on how this new venture is doing?

[Jean-Paul Chauvet]

Yes. So a number of metrics. We're looking at the number of suppliers that we're onboarding. We're looking at the number of SKUs, and we're looking at, obviously, transaction volumes on ordering inside of the platform.

[Daniel Chan, Research Analyst]

Okay. And then, Brandon, one for you. Your guidance for next quarter suggests that EBITDA margin comes off. Can you just give some color on that?

[Brandon Blair Nussey, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. It's really just a couple of things. One, as you heard from our comments, it's a seasonally down quarter. And with an increasing portion of the revenues coming through Payments, especially with the addition of ShopKeep and Upserve now onboard as well, you kind of take a seasonally lower quarter on transaction volumes against largely fixed cost base that is a technology company, and that's one contributor, just a sequential change. Secondly, the integration of ShopKeep and Upserve, we are expecting a slight downward impact in this first quarter, again, mainly due to the seasonal nature of that -- those businesses, which is very comparable to our own. The last thing, though not a very main thing, is piece of the FX environment isn't helping us at the moment. It's not too, too big in the grand scheme things, but that's also playing a role in it.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Josh Beck with KBCM.

[Josh J. Beck, Senior Research Analyst]

I also wanted to ask about the Supplier Network. Obviously, really unique that you have a B2C Software and Payments business, and now you're certainly getting more into the B2B realm. So I'm just kind of curious like what's the time frame that we should be thinking about? When I think about to when you went public and you started to embark on Lightspeed Payments, you obviously have given us a lot of color and updates since then, but it was certainly a journey. I mean is this a multiyear initiative? And what milestones should we be really focused on? Certainly, the size of the Supplier Network, you gave us an update, which I think is a really important indicator. But just what other metrics should we be focused on in the coming quarters and years tied to this initiative?

[Jean-Paul Chauvet]

Okay. Great question. So it is a journey. It's a bit -- it's like Payments. But I think maybe I'll try and share our mindset with the steps and where we see this heading. So I think step number one for us, and this was listening to our customers actually, we need to make it easier for a customer to order directly through the Supplier Network. The harsh reality in small businesses is everything is pen and paper, there's a lot of back and forth, it's manual, it's inefficient, and it's also inefficient for the supplier. So step one for us was to make automation possible within the network, within the software and go vertical by vertical to try and go inside of the verticals where we have a lot of penetrations. And here, there's really 2 advantages. We see one is operational efficiencies for our stores. And the other advantage is really for the suppliers having visibility on sell-through and helping them adjust manufacturing so that we can get to a model that's fully integrated. So here, what you can expect in the coming quarters is expect to see more and more verticals where we have concentration, where we'll just be onboarding more and more suppliers within the platform and with the goal of efficiency. I think one -- so that's one track. The second track in our mind is Payments. Lightspeed Payments right now -- we're using Lightspeed Payments from store to consumer, we should be using Lightspeed Payments from store to supplier. And this means that when -- once they select the items they want to order, once they've had visibility on the stock and the inventory levels at the supplier and once they've passed the order, we expect them to use Lightspeed Payments to actually pay for that order. And then for us, the value here is we monetize both ways, and we monetize on the sell side, but also on the buy side. And then I think as we go into all of this, I think the last piece for us is, think about all the acquisitions we've done, and we acquire normally companies that have basically sourced within the same verticals as Lightspeed, we want to make all of this available to all of the stores within the network. And here, you can imagine that as, I don't know, we put all these -- you put ShopKeep and Lightspeed together in the U.S., there's a ton of commonalities in the verticals where we both operate. And I think there, we can gain concentration. And then I think the last piece for us is really to look at commerce at large and figure out how we're going to use data to actually help suppliers identify new stores that should be selling their supplies that are not selling their supplies. And here, you can think about this with us looking at the data, analyzing the data and really fingerprinting suppliers to stores by looking at commonalities of inventory and outliers that should be sold by those stores. So I think for us, it's a journey. It's a very exciting journey, and it's just the first step. But I think when you think about this, once you're in the core of all of this and you're providing value to the entire flywheel from suppliers to stores to consumers, you really become a very sticky platform. And I think the last piece is think about cost of acquisition and lifetime value. As soon as you have the network and you have the entire ecosystem promoting Lightspeed, the cost of acquisition goes down and lifetime value goes up. So it's a journey, but we're very excited about the journey. And really excited that the product is finally out, and we can bring it to market.

[Josh J. Beck, Senior Research Analyst]

Thanks for sharing those thoughts, JP. Super helpful. Follow-up for you, Brandon, on the Payments opportunity. You have the very helpful slide that shows the adoption and some of the geos and verticals. Certainly seems to be going in the right direction. I'm just kind of curious once we think about what this is going to look like maybe after we've incorporated ShopKeep and Upserve, which I believe have higher ARPUs in part because they've been successful at payments, if we should be expecting it to kick up? Or just curious on how the incorporation of those companies will impact these dynamics?

[Brandon Blair Nussey, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes, for sure, will tick up the Upserve business in particular. The vast majority of their customers were using Upserve payments as kind of they have a really nice elegant solution that embeds Payments right into the product itself. ShopKeep, they were further along as well on the Payments journey from a customer adoption perspective, though as we've talked about, largely through a referral model, but a good percentage of their customers do use a payment solution there. And as we talked about earlier, the teams are working hard to move those or to build the infrastructure to make sure that Lightspeed Payments is available to those customers. So all told, we expect those things to really positively impact our overall penetration at a global level. And of course, that's core to what we're trying to do around here is to make sure that the vast majority of our customers worldwide take Payments. So all these things, I think, are helpful.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Timothy Chiodo from Crédit Suisse.

[Timothy Edward Chiodo, Director]

I wanted to dig in a little bit more about the path ahead for embedding additional financial services beyond Payments and Capital. So we've talked a little bit in the past about how instant payouts could be a logical next step for you guys. And maybe you could just talk a little bit about how you would see the demand for that offering. What the penetration of the Payments volume that would sort of be able to be recycled and go out that path? And maybe some sample use cases. And also how the monetization of that might work?

[Brandon Blair Nussey, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. So look, I think we're in the early stages here for Lightspeed. We're at an exciting stage where we're seeing obviously Payments uptake accelerate and all that's good, and that puts us in a position to start to launch some of these things. We're -- probably the best example of what we're doing right now is the Capital offering itself, and we're a couple of quarters in working with -- largely with Stripe right now to kind of test that, and we're seeing a lot of good customer receptivity to this. We're still -- as I mentioned in prior quarters, we expected the first goal at this to be a little bit of getting used to each other, a little bit of working out some of the workflows and processes, but we're seeing good customer interest. We're seeing good initial progress with Capital. And end of the day, I think it's too early to say exactly what percentage of our customer base is going to take advantage of some of these opportunities or financial opportunities, but we're excited about it. There's enough there that kind of suggest that this is -- these are going to be good contributors to the business in the mid to long term, for sure.

[Timothy Edward Chiodo, Director]

Great. And just since you mentioned it, just a quick follow-up on Capital. Are there any metrics you can share around just average loan sizes or repeat rates or any metrics? I know it's very early, but anything you might be able to share.

[Brandon Blair Nussey, Chief Financial Officer]

So with Stripe, loans are up to $100,000. We're largely sitting on top of their infrastructure, I think, as you know. Still early days, so certainly too early to be measuring repeat rates and that sort of thing. Average loan size is obviously a lot less than that $100,000 number, but that is the offer right now. ShopKeep, Dax mentioned in the call, ShopKeep had a much more advanced capital product than we did as well, and we've started to leverage now their expertise. They pressed pause a little bit at the onset of COVID here and ramping that back up now. So we'll have some more things to share there, I think, as we learn from their experience, and we can start to share some of the metrics we're seeing there. But suffice it to say, they were at it a couple of years ahead of us in terms of this offering and had some really nice returns and really nice success with it, which gives us optimism for the overall business.

[Timothy Edward Chiodo, Director]

Excellent. Yes, it's a great point on the ShopKeep capital.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Todd Coupland from CIBC.

[Todd Adair Coupland]

I wanted to ask about competition. A number of cloud players seem to have gained some stable footing during the second half of 2020. And I'm just wondering if you see any risk of pressure on pricing, whether subscription rates or payments rates? Or is it still features and functionality of omnichannel supplier network and that kind of thing that's driving decisions? Could you just talk about the landscape in the last 6 months?

[Jean-Paul Chauvet]

Yes. I'll take this one. In all transparency, I think we've never had a better model. So we don't feel pressure from competitors. We -- if you look at our organic, if you look at our close rates, if you look at the ARPU, we're not feeling that pressure. We're actually seeing more and more customers wanting to buy a full package from one vendor versus buying from multiple vendors. We see our customers wanting solutions like ours because they need to integrate all of the delivery networks on the restaurant front, and they need to have true omnichannel when you think about physical retailers with multi-location support. So I think the offering is very strong. And I think that the market is stronger than it's ever been, and we do not feel any pressure right now on pricing for many of our competitors.

[Operator]

Your question comes from the line of Paul Treiber from RBC.

[Paul Michael Treiber, Director of Canadian Technology & Analyst]

I was just hoping, could you bridge between the strong growth in revenues this quarter? I think excluding ShopKeep and Upserve, it was up 53% and then GTV, also on an organic basis. And is the faster growth of revenue, is it predominantly due to Payments and perhaps additional software modules that's driving the stronger growth there?

[Brandon Blair Nussey, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. So you kind of have to deconstruct that a little bit. So within the GTV, and some of these were in my prepared comments, I think they're -- you'll find them in the press release as well, retail had a wonderful quarter, up 41% year-over-year. Within that, e-commerce volumes up 100% year-over-year. Overall GTV organic growth dragged down, though, by hospitality, which was down 19% organically. And so that's what's happening inside of GTV. And when you convert that into revenue, as you'll see in the Payments kind of penetration slide, most of our Payments revenue comes from our retail space right now. So we're sort of benefiting on the Payments uptake, primarily through retail, which is performing exceptionally well. And on the hospitality side, it drags down GTV, but really doesn't have a huge impact on revenue until we kind of look at the additions of Upserve, which is going to be a next quarter thing more than a this quarter thing as they wrestle with the impact of lockdowns. Makes sense?

[Paul Michael Treiber, Director of Canadian Technology & Analyst]

Yes. No, that's helpful and connects the dots there. When you look at longer term in those 2 segments of retail versus hospitality, should the correlation between revenue and GTV over time align? Or do you think that they'll always be fairly independent of each other?

[Brandon Blair Nussey, Chief Financial Officer]

No, it will start to the align. We're just -- we launched in U.S. retail for Payments first. Canadian retail is the second market we launched mainly because that's where the majority of our own GTV was. So we're just newer into the hospitality space with Payments. I think we launched it kind of, I don't know, maybe March of this past year. And of course, that hospitality segment has been dealing with some things all year long. So once we get back to a more normalized environment, we're going to see hospitality uptake of Payments rival or exceed, I think, retail, and those things will start to align.

[Gus Papageorgiou]

Operator, we'll take one last question.

[Operator]

Your next question here comes from Tien-Tsin Huang from JPMC.

[Tien-Tsin Huang]

Really great results. I wanted to ask on the location growth being very, very strong. How broad-based was the location strength? Any additional color you can share on where you were positively surprised? Are there, say, geographically or vertically or by size or type of client? Same question on attrition, too, if you have anything to share there.

[Brandon Blair Nussey, Chief Financial Officer]

So retail, we continue to do really, really well in retail right now. It's -- the omnichannel solution, I think is resonating really well and retail really been a great performer despite even the challenging overall environment in that space. Europe has had a tougher go of late just because of the lockdowns in Europe have been fairly strict and firm, and that tends to mute the new customer adds. And we shone a light on Australia as just having a wonderful quarter as they've kind of emerged a little more quickly from this virus situation, I suppose, and we saw really good performance there. The last area we wanted to highlight where we're seeing just really, really strong momentum and kudos to the Lightspeed team behind all this is the golf segment. We're seeing triple-digit revenues almost in that -- growth in that space right now as golf has kind of had a rejuvenated experience globally, I suppose. And as golf courses around the world look to upgrade their own infrastructure, we're really benefiting right now.

[Tien-Tsin Huang]

Great for social distancing golf. I want to ask one more. Just on sales and marketing. That did step up quite a bit sequentially on a dollar basis, Brandon. Is this a new baseline to consider? And are you seeing better returns on efforts here? And is that related to my first question on location growth, for example? Just curious on anything else you could share on that.

[Brandon Blair Nussey, Chief Financial Officer]

I think it's one of the more encouraging things, not that we are laser-focused on EBITDA positivity at the moment given all the growth opportunities. But if you look at sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue year-over-year, and I encourage you to look at the last table in our press release where we sort of normalize all this, I think we're really starting to see the leverage in the model, and we're seeing the benefits of just some momentum in the increased brand worldwide. We're adding more stores than ever. Sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue is going down significantly. So the uptick in dollars is mainly addition of the acquisitions, just taking in their own sales and marketing, but the overall percentage of revenue is we're really starting to see some nice leverage.

[Operator]

And there are no further questions at this time. I'll turn the call back over to Gus Papageorgiou for any closing comments.

[Gus Papageorgiou]

Great. Thanks, everybody, for joining us today. And just a reminder, on February 17 we are going to be having a webinar on the Supplier Network. JP will be joining us, along with Peter Dougherty, our VP of Partnerships, and we will have speakers there from Giant Bicycles as well. So if you haven't registered, please go to our -- to the IR portion of our website to register, and we look forward to speaking to everybody there at then. Thanks, everybody, for joining us, and have a great day.

[Operator]

And ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.