Artisan craft marketplace Etsy has had its ups and downs since going public almost three years ago, but new CEO Josh Silverman appears to have convinced investors that sales are on track for solid growth in 2018.
Etsy’s stock price jumped as much as 24% in midday trading on Wednesday, and has now more than doubled from a year ago, thanks to Silverman’s turnaround strategy that got the company out of Amazon’s long shadow. The stock closed at $25.31, up 20% on the day.
Silverman, a veteran of eBay’s (EBAY) Shopping.com site, has emphasized simple improvements like adding “best seller” badges and site-wide sales for Labor Day and Cyber Monday last year, as well as deeper changes that improved customer searches using artificial intelligence and machine learning with a program Etsy calls “Context Specific Search ranking.”
The results pleased Wall Street. Etsy reported solid fourth quarter results on Tuesday evening, including sales on the site increasing 15% to $1 billion—the company’s first billion dollar quarter ever—while Etsy’s own revenue, which includes its cut of the sales plus other services it sells, increased 21% to $136 million. Earnings per share of 36 cents reversed a loss of 19 cents per share last year and beat Wall Street’s expectations of just 13 cents (though the latest quarter included a one-time benefit from the new tax law).
Analysts also cheered Etsy’s forecast for 2018, including overall sales on the site increasing 14% to 16% to as much as $3.8 billion and its own revenue growing 21% to 23% to as much as $543 million. Analysts had forecast Etsy’s 2018 revenue would hit only $519 million.
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Silverman explained the improvements that led to last year’s growing sales, while also offering more ideas that will boost growth this year. “There’s still much work to do to improve the shipping experience on Etsy and this will be an area of strong focus in 2018,” he told analysts on a call on Tuesday.
Still, there were complaints from some sellers and buyers last year that Etsy was losing its identity as a craft marketplace focused on individual artisans amid all the changes. Silverman said the latest results were proof that, on the whole, his strategy was working for most.
“You know as a platform our job is to make the experience better for all of our buyers and sellers,” he said. “On any given day, there will be individual winners and losers because that’s the nature of the marketplace–you know, is the product that a particular seller is selling, is it in fashion or not, how is it resonating with the marketplace, that’s up to each of our sellers.”
Under prior CEO Chad Dickerson, Etsy stumbled in the face of growing pressure from Amazon (AMZN), which introduced its own handmade craft-oriented platform just a few months after Etsy went public. Dickerson was pushed out last May after a disastrous first quarter that led to layoffs
Further improvements at Etsy this year will come from giving sellers better data analytics tools, making it easier for buyers to have items shipped quickly, and further optimizing search results, among other initiatives, Silverman said. The company will also look at hosting more site-wide events with discounting, though Etsy (ETSY) doesn’t want to become known as a discount site, he said.
In many cases, “these are things that are perhaps best practices already used in other parts of the web that we haven’t yet adopted,” Silverman said. “We also want to make sure that we’re stretching ourselves and we’re thinking about bolder bigger events.”
