Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'm Jason Helfstein. I oversee internet research for Oppenheimer. I'm very excited to have Etsy CEO Josh Silverman and CFO Rachel Glaser. We, we've done this every year, I feel like, for a long time, originally in person, and for the last few, virtually, thanks for joining us. Most of you are familiar with how this works. I've got a number of questions that I've prepared. We also have a chat box. If you put questions in there, I'll try to get to them as well, or work them into my prepared questions. Please don't email me, 'cause I'm not taking a look at email, but use the chat. Let's get started.
The first question, I think, on everyone's mind is kind of, to some extent, you know, reaction to the stock post-earnings. You know, for those who didn't pay attention, results were, were modestly better in the quarter. You know, I think management is still considering this a challenging environment, and looking for growth kind of similar in the third quarter. You know, if we kind of just level set, right? Second quarter GMS was, was down 1%, compared to Amazon Online Stores up 4%, Wayfair down 3%, and Revolve down 6%, right? Kind of like somewhere in the middle. If we look at third quarter, you're guiding +1%, so a few points better at the midpoint for GMS. I think Wayfair is looking for up 5%, so a pretty meaningful acceleration from their -3%.
And I think Street's modelling Amazon Online Stores up 6%, and Revolve is, is still down 5%, you know, basically 1 point better. I guess when you, when you think about that, just how do you think, given kind of your categories, how you fit into all of this and, you know, what are investors missing?
Yeah. First, thanks for having us. We really appreciate being here. There was a lot that I found really positive in last quarter's earnings call. I'd encourage people to go back and take a look at that in detail, 'cause we're seeing a lot of really positive indicators. One thing we mentioned was that we were positive in each of May and June and July in terms of GMS growth. Obviously, revenue growth has been significantly positive all the way through. To put in context, you know, obviously, during the pandemic, you know, we and all the other e-commerce companies had, you know, a ton of tailwinds.
Now, you know, there's been reopening, there's a ton more competition for the wallet, from travel, from dining, as well as offline retail, and we're in a highly inflationary environment. When you put in context where Etsy is, we've grown at a CAGR of 29% for our years. Our four-year CAGR is 29% from pre-pandemic. Wayfair, I think, is 8. eBay, I think, is -5. Unlike almost everyone else, who, after the pandemic, shrank back to roughly the size they were before the pandemic, Etsy is massively bigger than what it was before the pandemic. Even, you know, this year, we have tougher comps. Most of the people you mentioned, they have really easy comps from last year, where they had a worse year than Etsy did.
Not talking about numbers and, and comps, what that really means, I think, is people during the pandemic had very few choices and had to go try Etsy and a number of other places. Unlike almost everywhere else, they have chosen to come back to Etsy again and again and again now, even with, you know, orders of magnitude, more choice, more competition, a highly inflationary environment. We've held virtually all of the spend, virtually all of the gains that we've gotten. And I think that's a testament to the fact that Etsy does something truly unique, truly different, truly special, that has really resonated with people through cycles. Obviously, what matters now is how do we grow off this much, much larger base? Undeniably, we've pulled forward, you know, years of growth.
When I look at the data, what I see is still only one in three women in the United States has shopped on Etsy in the last 12 months. Only one in 10 men in the United States have shopped on Etsy, for those who do shop on Etsy, they shopped only an average of 3 x per year. We know we have so much more opportunity to serve people, that's only talking about the United States. Our growth internationally has also been very strong, we're seeing really encouraging trends, where the model that's working so well in Etsy is working equally well in the U.K., if you look at market penetration, has tons of potential with really positive indicators in places like Germany, France, and much of the rest of Western Europe, if not beyond.
We think what we do is really powerful. We think it's unique, and we think we've seen a lot of data to suggest that, that, you know, I, I believe, truly enduring. The last thing I'll say is, you know, another thing we talked about in this earnings call is that we're actually seeing quite a lot of strength in the U.S. in households over 100,000. It's really households under 100,000 where we're seeing weakness. When you look across e-commerce, what you're seeing is people that sell essentials very, very cheaply are the ones who appear to be growing, and everyone else is having a tougher time. For households under 100,000, there is really less opportunity for things they want, and they're really having to focus exclusively on things they need.
Even for the things they need, what is the cheapest possible version of that thing they need? That's a cycle, and cycles come and go. I'm old enough now to have lived through three, and to realize that you've got the, the down part of the cycle and the up part of the cycle, and our job is to keep building a great business that survives and thrives and grows through cycles, and we're very committed to doing that.
Great. Josh, one, one more for you, and then a question for Rachel. If I wanna get a bit deeper into categories, you know, you could, depending on data you look at, I mean, it looks like to us, we think you're gaining share. Like, again, I don't think we've had all the macro data out yet, 'cause it does take time. You know, focusing on, on home and living, again, your point of you have more difficult comps than your peers. I mean, talk about how when you think about the categories, that, like, impacts your relative results, right?
'Cause I think people look at, you know, Wayfair, and they say, "Well, if Wayfair's seeing an improvement, given they're so focused on home, and it's your largest category, why wouldn't you be seeing improvement?" Like, and do you, you look at them and say, "Well, we do, we do home differently than they do," or... Just how, how do you, how do you think about that, and maybe work that into your outlook?
Sure. You know, we said we were positive in July, Wayfair said they were positive in July. We said we were down about 1% in Q2, they were down about 3% in Q2. We're all roughly in the same ballpark, except for the fact that Etsy, you know, has a 29% CAGR, and everyone else is a fraction of that. Let's not get lost in that. Let's look at the forward-looking opportunity. Again, you know, Etsy offers something really unique and different.
If you think about all the things you wanna buy for the home, wallpaper, throw pillows, couches, you know, on Etsy, you have the opportunity to buy something that's truly unique and special just for you, and get it at a really fair price, and get it within a reasonable amount of time. Home is something that's about self-expression, so we think that's really a category that plays to our strengths, and it's our largest category. As you know, Etsy sold last year billions of dollars worth of home furnishings, yet, if you ask consumers, "Name places to go shop for home furnishings," only 3% of people in the United States will name Etsy. If you say, "Go shop for home furnishings," only 3% will name Etsy. We sold billions of dollars home furnishings last year. Our unaided consideration is very low right now.
The opportunity to build that connection... If you think home furnishings, you should think Etsy. We think there's enormous upside in building unprompted consideration for Etsy in the category, and home furnishings is an enormous category, right? The other big opportunity for Etsy is really have gotten to be very strong... what you're looking for. I've furnished my living room, and I'm missing this one piece, and I know exactly what I want. Etsy does a great job. Our search engine has gotten dramatically better, and we do a really good job of that.
If you come saying, "I'm looking to furnish a living room, give me ideas," Etsy throws listing after listing at you, goes straight to the very, very narrow, and has not been great at, at walking through, "Well, what style do you like?" "Let me show you different..." We're making tremendous gains right now on inspiration for people who don't already know. For example, we launched Shop the Look just recently, where when you pick one item that you like for the home, we will find you. If you pick, let's say, an end table, we'll find a rug and, and, and lighting that works together with the piece you've found.
That's a great example of where these new AI technologies are tremendously more powerful than anything we've seen before, and I think for Etsy more than most, have the opportunity to unlock, really incredible gains, given that there's 115 million things for sale on Etsy, and none of them map to a catalog. The ability for AI to really help to organize the world for us, I think, is a, is a huge opportunity.
I think I've got some AI questions later. I wonder, Rachel, just, just talk philosophy around guidance, and then we'll kind of move on past the quarter. I've covered the stock for a long time. You, you've always guided based on current trends, and, and kind of not, you know, try to guess or, or extrapolate. You know, there is commentary, again, about improving trends in the third quarter, again, maybe based on guidance for some of your competitors or just views on the economy. Just frame it: How should investors think about your third-quarter outlook and, and kind of what's driving it?
Absolutely. Thanks, Jason. Well, first of all, Josh and I, we don't try to game it. We really try to give you, be as transparent as we can be with what we know and give a range of likely outcomes. When we do our own forecast internally, we look at what our baseline trend is showing us, and we layer on top of that what we expect from incremental, marketing investments that will drive incremental GMS, and what we expect from incremental, GMS driven by product development investments. We have pretty good quantitative, analysis that goes around, goes around for both of those factors to layer on top where we expect GMS to land. The last layer would be things out of our control, like macroeconomic trends, which we've talked a lot about in the last four, eight quarters.
Lots of unprecedented stuff. Specifically for Q2, the guidance we gave at the midpoint assumes that the macroeconomic trends that we, we are seeing in July stay just about the same. At the high point of our guide, we say that we, we figure that the macroeconomic trends could ease and provide a little bit more tailwind, and that's at the high end. At the low end of our guide, we say the macroeconomic trends worsen as we go, as we go through the quarter, and that's how we balanced our, our ranges. We did say that May, June, and July were all positive, and there's some really nice tea leaves in there.
Before I hand it back over to you to ask the next question, I just wanted to add on to what Josh was saying when we were looking at comparisons versus competitors, particularly in the home and living category. He talked about top line, but I just wanna give that statement on the bottom line, we've always talked about how much we love our capital light business model. If you compare free cash flow, us versus other competitors, there's quite a disparity, so we really love our model. We...
You saw that in the guidance that we gave, the Etsy core marketplace, EBITDA guidance puts us well, you know, above a 30% threshold, which was actually our long-term guide that we gave in 2019, that over the long term we expect it to be over 30%, and we've been there all this time.
Got it. That's a good segue to the next question, Rachel, just about marketing. You know, main drivers of the growth are buyer and spend per buyer. You can drive buyers by spending more on marketing. You know, re-engagement is a different factor we can get to. There, there's some paid marketing, but a lot of that's organic. You know, we estimate marketing, you know, will go from 29% of revenue in 2020 to 25% this year, so a four-point kind of decline over, over those three years. You've talked about pulling back on performance marketing, but you've also talked about, you know, machine learning, doing a better job of targeted emails, improving search. You know, when is the right time to, to, to lean into to marketing? Just some perspective there.
W- well, we believe we are leaning into marketing, and we, we do everything with an ROI lens on what we do. As you- as we've said many times before, we, we will spend until the last marginal dollar of spend is no longer hitting the ROI threshold that we, that we have set for ourselves. We constantly retest our attribution models to say, for instance, "If you clicked on a SEM ad, would you have come anyway in an SEO result that would've come in for free?" We're constantly refining those attribution models, and we can therefore pull back and lean in more to performance marketing. Things that change on us might be CPCs, for instance, w- during the pandemic, we enjoyed lower relative CPCs because many traditional advertisers were sitting on the sidelines for people...
when people were stuck at home. We know there's other players out there that will spend aggressively on marketing upside down, not ROI positive, and we haven't really gone to that place where we would say, "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, we're just gonna lean heavily into marketing and forget about what that does to our margins." We also always think about growing naturally, because otherwise you create for yourself a very large growth or a problem where you have to keep spending it to get the next year's growth. Thank goodness marketing is... First of all, we've been we're very, very pleased with how our marketing has performed, and we spent some time on this last call breaking down how we see LTV to CAC.
Bear in mind that we've increased LTV about 50%, at the same time as we've opened up a bunch of new channels in the full funnel of marketing. We believe that our ROI on marketing has increased about 40% over the last four years, and will continue to lean into marketing as we increase LTV from a number of initiatives. Talk about the product in a minute, but as product improves conversion rate, can we increase our marketing spend. We continue to optimize as well, so that we're getting, you know, we're reducing CAC at the same time. Marketing's not our only lever, so we also have product. The goal for us is to increase, get more buyers, and that can be new buyers or reactivated buyers.
We have a pool of about 100 million reactivated buyers that we don't see dissipating anytime soon. We had a 21% increase in reactivated buyers, and they actually are 35% more valuable in the first year after we reactivate them, versus a new buyer. We also spend money on more GMS per buyer, so that's the second tranche where we really want more frequency and have more average order value. A lot of that comes from marketing, but also from the product itself, as Josh was just describing. Then we want more revenue, so you've seen Etsy ads continue to grow. Finally, we want to continue to grow profit. Those are the four. That's the framework for where we spend our marketing and our product dollars.
You know, frequency's been a stubborn little sucker to move, but over the course of the pandemic, we moved it from an average of 2 x per active buyer to 3 x per active buyer, and we see no reason why that couldn't be 12 x, once per month, per active buyer. All of our product teams are really maniacally focused on things that can move the needle on frequency or conversion rate in general.
I mean, Josh, that's a good segue, right? Of those, you basically said, you know, $100 million+ of UVs who are not converting, or just even others who have lower frequency, what are you doing on the product side? You alluded to improving search, but I think we've been talking about improving search for probably a few years now, and machine learning and cloud. What are you doing on the product side to improve, kind of like the conversion, the customer experience?
I'm really excited about our product roadmap. In fact, I think I'm more excited about our product roadmap now than I was even, even five or six years ago. We've talked for several years, Jason Helfstein, you and I, about improving search, and we've made incredible gains in relevance. Now, we understand what you meant, not just what you said. If you come and you type into a search engine, you know, "cocktail attire for men," we're gonna show you mostly sport coats. Even though the word "sport" and "coat" did not appear in your query, we understand what you meant. That's an example of neural network translators, and that same kind of technology, neural network translators, is gonna sound familiar to many people, 'cause that's what gen AI is also based on.
We've been using that same kind of fundamental technology now for several years, as a result, if you know generally what you're looking for on Etsy, we do a really good job. It is the case, though, that for most queries, we have 1,000, if not tens of thousands, of relevant search results. When you come and look for something, we get you a relevant set. The question is, of the five to 10,000 items that are relevant, which are the 30 we should put on the first page of search results? Our big focus right now is understanding quality. We know that items that are visually appealing, for example, convert 2x as well as items where the quality of photography, the lighting, the styling of the image isn't as good.
We have historically used humans to try to curate what are things that are really visually appealing. Obviously, across 115 million items, you can't use humans, so we're now starting to train our AI models to use the human labeling to train AI to say, "What is a visually appealing listing?" Really have the ones that are visually appealing come to the surface. Second, does it have good pricing? Third, can I trust the service from the seller? On pricing, we're also starting to use much more sophisticated technology to help our sellers, to give our sellers insight into how they should price their items. Not just what's else that's similar to your item is listed on the site, but which ones are actually selling and at what price.
Giving our sellers that data, they can do a better job of setting good prices, and we can do a better job of understanding which items appear to be priced appropriately. By the way, there's a penalty for charging too much sometimes, and there's a penalty for charging too little sometimes, right? A seller who underprices not only may not be getting enough value for her work, but also buyers may think it's lower quality than it actually is, right? Getting it right, not too high, not too low, appropriately priced, is actually the sweet spot, and we're doing a lot of work right now on pricing to help give our sellers the data. We don't set prices, our sellers do, but to give them the data so they can do a better job on pricing.
The other thing our sellers really want help with is promotions. When should they put things on sale? How much should they put them on sale for? For what types of items? That's another area where we can share a lot of insight. For example, most of our sellers, when they put something on sale, put it on sale for 10% off. We have some early insights that very often 10% off is not worth it. It's not enough to cause someone to buy, and so you've just sort of given up 10% of your revenue without getting much for it. If you're gonna put something on sale, put it on sale for, for, for deeper than 10%.
Those kinds of insights, I think we can do a better job of getting and then sharing with our sellers so that they can price things appropriately. Trust is incredibly important. We've made great gains ensuring that items are gonna arrive on time, and if you look at our on-time arrival rate now versus what it was three or four years ago, there's been a really dramatic improvement in that. We can do better at communicating to our buyers that things generally do arrive on time, and we have their back. We have their back if something goes wrong.
We've launched now Etsy Purchase Protection, but awareness of that program is still very low, building the trust that things are gonna go well for people, because our sellers actually do a great job, and things do go well the vast majority of the time. That idea of quality, appropriate pricing, and trust, we've got a great roadmap around all of those things, and I'm really excited about how that builds up through the holiday.
I, I wanna go back to marketing for a second. I feel like marketing is not a particularly. It's a challenging, you know, a challenging task in that, you know, we think about, like, retail media, CTV, social media have been these amazing new platforms for marketers. You know, if you're DTC, you can kind of plug right into somebody's social feed, you know, you know, CTV. Look, if I'm thinking about buying a gift for my wife's birthday on Thursday, and I'm on Etsy, you don't wanna target to me when I'm watching CTV with her before I buy the item, right? Like, there's, you know. So then it's like, do you market the item? Do you market the Etsy brand?
You know, like, I, I don't necessarily think you fit into the way retail media works, and so just, like, I don't know, like, is marketing more difficult if we think about it in a way, because there's more channels where the consumers are, but not all those channels necessarily lend themselves to the way you want to market? Just maybe how you've had to reorganize marketing over the last few years around the, just way the number of channels, digital channels in particular, have exploded.
I mean, I think marketing's been incredibly effective for Etsy, and if we think about where our brand is today versus where it was three or four years ago, I mean, honestly, when I, when I took this job not that long ago in 2017, I would have to say: "My name is Josh Silverman. I work for a company called Etsy. Etsy is an online marketplace." I mean, like, half the people I met had never heard of Etsy. Now, when I say I work for a company called Etsy, and it's... People are like, "What, do you think I'm stupid? Of course, I know what Etsy is," right? Our unaided awareness in the United States and in Great Britain is dramatically higher.
We've made greater than 10 percentage point gains in unprompted awareness just since we've started TV advertising in the U.S. Greater than 15% gains in the U.K., and 100% improvement in unprompted awareness in Germany since we started TV advertising. The top-of-the-funnel TV advertising, I think, can play a very big role. In the U.S., it's about connecting the brand Etsy, which people generally know and love, to specific purchase occasions. People say, "I love Etsy, but I don't know when to think of it," or, "I didn't have a need for it," right? In fact, they bought six things in the past three months that they could have bought on Etsy. They just didn't realize it.
TV, I think, can play a really important role, and our TV campaign, Etsy Has It, is really about cementing all the different use cases for Etsy, starting with home furnishings, style, and gifting, as three very specific purchase occasions where we want you to think of Etsy. Bottom of the funnel, PLA, the majority of Etsy's marketing spend goes to Google PLAs, and that's a very high-intent moment where you're looking for something specific. Again, people are looking for something specific, and they didn't think of Etsy. They went to Google, they did a Google search, and we show up, and people say, "Of course, I'm looking for back to school. Of course, Etsy's gonna have something really cool for back to school right now that'll set my kid apart. A really unique backpack or something else that'll make them feel special," right?
I wanna do that." They land, and they convert, and that. You know, the advantage of that is it's very easy to track the ROI, and we're, we're really been very scientific about it. The newer area for us is mid-funnel, and that's things like social video, YouTube video, Facebook video, others, and that's really about building repeat traffic and building presence around events and occasions. For example, someone who's planning a wedding, someone who's got a birthday coming up, someone who's planning a trip. If we can focus on more specific purchase occasions within that mid-funnel to say, "Hey, Etsy's amazing for weddings. Etsy is amazing for birthdays. Etsy is amazing for travel," those are moments where I think we're learning now how to build that mid-funnel better, and, and I think there's, there's huge opportunity and time to come.
I'll, I'll just close by saying the things you talked about, like CTV, I think are gonna be amazing for Etsy. You know, if we can understand and target people piece by piece, by someone who just moved home or is planning a wedding, that's great. Our, our challenge right now is those channels relative to us are just quite small. So there's not a ton of inventory yet, and that inventory tends to be pretty expensive, and we are very ROI-focused.
Right. Yeah.
Those channels are gonna grow, and rates are gonna come down, and as they do, I think that's a, a great opportunity for us.
So Rachel, to that, on the whole LTV, the, you know, CAC payback, I mean, look, when you do some of those things, you like... You know, do you have a cohort of users that you know, you're willing to let's push out the payback, you know, and kind of test? I mean, just, you know, have you been doing that? Look, we've been in a tough environment, and there's been a focus on the bottom line, and we'll get to that, and so there's been less of a desire to kind of do test marketing. Whereas in a better environment, there may be more desire to kind of play around with, you know, customer acquisition payback.
Yeah, I, I'm so impressed and proud of our marketing team 'cause they're very sophisticated in how they think about these things, and I hope I do it justice in my answer. First, first thing I wanna talk on the LTV side, do recall that we launched a product called Offsite Ads a few years ago. That was a way to... That effectively took take rate up about 1 percentage point. Our sellers can, when we use our own PLA program, and when there's a successful sale on one of the products of our sellers that we list, if they have a successful sale, they pay a slightly higher transaction fee, and that offsets about 35% of our performance marketing spend. That's point number one that I, I think most people understand. We've seen people...
You'll, you'll come up with a wrong result on what our ROI is if you don't factor that in. We also, when we, when we are acquiring a new buyer, we're, we're willing to pay more. We're, we're taking a lifetime value, not just an in-session value, and that means that there's some tail, some future value, some future value on that spend. It's another thing sometimes people get wrong. You have to credit it for the whole lifetime of that buyer that we acquired.
You may say, "Well, then, if you're also spending to reactivate buyers, are you double-dipping?" We actually discount our, the, the, the lifetime value of that new buyer by a certain percentage to take into account that we're gonna continue to market to them, to, to either shop more often or to reactivate them at some period of time. Remember, people, we call an active buyer, somebody who comes at least once a year. On day 366, they become a lapsed buyer, and that's, you know, people don't even realize that they've lapsed. They, they, they say they love Etsy, but they forgot about coming to us because on Mother's Day or for their, for their kid's birthday party.
So they're really ripe for reactivation because we already have the affinity and the love of the brand. That marketing is very effective. The last thing I want to say is that all the parts of the funnel work together. When we're spending on performance marketing, it makes the brand marketing work better, work harder, and vice versa. So, if, for instance, we stop in one part of the channel, we can see that it has a downstream effect on the other parts of the channel, and that's. We do test that from time to time. We've started to see some very positive impact from small amounts of performance marketing spend in non-core Western European markets, so we'll continue to test this, test our marketing in new channels globally.
As you pointed out, we do do some test marketing, very judiciously. That's marketing we know isn't ROI positive yet, but we'll test it to see if we can optimize it and mature that channel and get it to be positive. There are certain parts of the funnel that we just sort of, invest in lightly or stay on the sidelines for because we don't see it as ROI positive. Hope that answered your question.
... Josh, let's shift to TAM for a bit. My thesis is that Etsy dramatically expanded its category coverage during COVID, moving from historically handmade crafts and unique items, which was kind of the branding of Etsy, way back to everything, basically, except maybe electronics and sporting goods. Do you agree with that? Do you, like, think that, again, the public, the customer perception, like, fully understands that you know, the broad array of items you can get at Etsy now, where that was not maybe the case four or five years ago?
I would say Etsy hasn't changed. Customer awareness of Etsy has. First, you know, we stay true to our roots, that the things on Etsy are made by the person you're buying it from or designed by the person you're buying it from in close collaboration with, with a production partner, or they're vintage. That's very important that we do something different. It turns out that things can be made just for you and still be very affordable, 'cause there's not three markups between them and you. People are suddenly aware that it's also not sitting on a boat for, you know, a week or two to cross a big ocean.
You know, they may be made in small lots just for you, but they're going directly from the seller's house to your house, and that can make it both affordable and timely. You know, before the pandemic, Etsy only had, like, 40 million items. Now we've got 115 million. Even with 40 million, if you could imagine it, it was mostly for sale on Etsy. There weren't a lot of things that you couldn't find on Etsy before. You know, even categories-
There's a lot more choice now.
What's that?
A lot, a lot more choice now.
More choice now, but there was unlimited choice before, and now there's 2x the unlimited choice today. You know, supply wasn't a constraint before, and it's even less of a constraint now. Like, even categories people wouldn't have normally associated us with, like sporting goods or electronics, if you go look for pickleball supplies or fishing supplies on Etsy right now, I promise you're gonna find a lot of great stuff. On electronics, you know, it's back-to-school time. My daughter's off to college next year, and so I took her to the Apple Store yesterday and bought her an iPad and an iPad pen so she could do her note-taking. Now she's got an iPad, pen, and plugs that she needs to keep track of.
The first thing she does, she goes to Etsy to buy a little pouch to hold that, to keep it together with her iPad. There's actually a lot of electronics accessories.
Yeah, right, or your phone case you could get on Etsy, a custom phone case.
Phone cases are on Etsy. Baking-
Okay, derivative, derivative electronics, right?
Exactly. I had no idea there was a thriving baking... Like, people who like to make baked bread. Like, that turned out to be a whole thing on Etsy. I just wasn't aware of it until the pandemic happened, and everyone started baking bread, and we realized that there's been, all along, a really thriving bread baking community on Etsy. You know, what I, what I would suggest to people who are thinking about buying the stock, go look at the last 10 things you bought online. I'm willing to bet seven or eight of them you could have bought on Etsy. With a, a little bit of time, you'd find that there's a version of that item on Etsy that you actually like better, that's at a really fair price.
We can do an even better job of getting you to that item, but that's getting better and better. It's just that you didn't think of it. It's just that you didn't think of it. We have always had a tremendous breadth, and that's why we talk about our TAM as being, you know, so great. Home you know, if we only did home furnishings, no one would worry about the TAM. If we only did apparel, no one would worry about the TAM. If we only did jewelry, no one would worry about the TAM. Gifts, baby supplies, you know, and on and on, back to school. It's just we do almost everything, and so it's a little hard to get your head around it. But our sellers do a great job coming up with great ideas for, for virtually everything.
We've got five minutes left. I think that probably gives us two more questions. I wanna ask about, kind of... we can put the two questions together, kind of like M&A and, and capital allocation. Reverb obviously was a successful acquisition. Depop is on its way, it looks like, to being successful. Elo7 did not work as planned. I mean, where do you go from here? Like, should investors assume you're gonna kind of hoard up capital and continue to look for, like, the next strategic M&A? Is it you're better off just buying back stock, or just doing other things with your, kind of- to make your, you know, your capital structure more efficient? Just whoever wants to take the question, how should investors think about it?
Maybe I can start, and Josh can pile on real quick. You know, I'll say the things we've been saying about capital allocation. There's really three ways to spend our capital. We, we convert about 90% of our EBITDA to free cash flow on a trailing 12-month basis, and that's a virtue of our very capital-light business model. We're not buying inventory or running fulfillment centers and retail shops, and things like that. We, we can choose to replenish our cash reserves lower, and invest more in our organic operating investments like product development and marketing. That's 1 choice. We can do M&A. You've seen us do M&A, and we can... You know, we bought Depop, we bought Reverb, we bought Elo7. We don't have regrets about those investments.
Obviously we've just sold Elo7, so that one did not work out. We are super excited about Depop. We wish we hadn't bought it when we bought it, 'cause we probably paid a pretty high premium for that business, but we're super excited about its growth. M&A is a second area for capital allocation, and the third is return of capital scenarios. We've been buying back shares to offset current and future dilution created by our stock-based comp, the equity that we grant to our employees, we feel is not free. There's an expense on our GAAP P&L. It doesn't show up in EBITDA, so we use our balance sheet to repurchase stock. We've done that over since 2017, the program has been ROI positive, and we, you saw that we just had an authorization for another $1 billion from our board.
Well, we haven't spent anything against that authorization, but you would expect to see us continue with that philosophy.
Okay, I'm gonna end on a quick AI question. We got, like, three minutes. Do you think given where... Look, all of the machine learning and kind of AI you historically have done in the past yourself, it was probably reasonably expensive, and you had to make pretty limiting decisions, "We can do this, we can't do that." No, you can't just test everything, 'cause AWS and cloud bills are expensive. Where we're now going, where there's more and more off-the-shelf AI tools, just talk about, you know... I hate to limit you to two minutes, Josh, but just talk about how incremental this will be to you to have access to those off-the-shelf tools, tools presumably at a pretty, pretty reasonably low cost.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a ton of productivity that can be driven through this. It can make our sellers more productive, 'cause it can make their lives easier. It can make our team more productive, 'cause it can help us to write code. It can help our customer support team to write customer support, and it can help our buyers have a better experience by helping them to find things and have a better conversation with Etsy about what it is that they need. I think all of that is great. I agree with the tone of your question. We will tend to rent from others whatever we can, and build ourselves only what we must. When it's unique to us and there's a real strategic advantage, we'll invest to build it.
In general, a lot of our vendors are gonna build tools with, with a lot of this built in, and we'll be happy to let them do that and, and share in the benefit.
Great, I think we're gonna wrap there. Josh, Rachel, thank you very much for the time today. Thanks everybody for joining us. Just feel free to reach out if you've got any more questions. We'll see you guys next year.
Thanks, Jason.
Thank you. Thanks, Jason.
Take care. Happy birthday to your wife.
Okay.