All right. Let's get started. And, thank you for everybody that joined us, this early. And I know there are also hundreds or thousands of people on the webcast. My name is Christian. I'm part of the UBS Payments and FinTech Research team. And we're super, super excited to have Global-E with us today. We have Amir Schlachet, CEO, and Ofer Koren, CFO, with us. Welcome. And, thank you again.
Thank you very much for having us.
Thank you.
Here and in general in the conference. It's a great, great event.
All right. So thank you. Appreciate it. And also, I guess with the first question, I think, for those of us that are not as familiar with the story, I think, Amir, would you like to kinda give us a walkthrough of, how you got here, what's the early days in the company, what's happened since you IPO, and all the journey, all your growth, and basically your vision of the company as well?
Sure. Absolutely. Try to be succinct. It's we have a lot to go through. So, you know, there's a big clock running here. So, let's say a quick overview. We started the company. We're three Co-Founders, Nir Debbi, Ofer Koren, and myself. We started the company in 2013. Still running the company today. I'm the company CEO. Nir is the President, and Ofer is our CFO. But I would say, generally speaking, what Global-e does is we enable, sorry, international direct-to-consumer e-commerce for brands and branded retailers around the world. That's kind of the tagline. But what that means is that we provide to these merchants kind of you can think of it as three layers of services, all bundled together. The first one is a full end-to-end capability suite, which is integrated into their e-commerce website.
So whichever platform they're running on, think of us as a plug. It's an actual plug-in to whatever platform they are running on, and once they're plugged in, all of a sudden, the website becomes automatically localized, irrespective of where the shopper is coming from. We support more than 200 countries. We fully localize the entire customer journey. We localize pricing. We localize payment methods. We localize the entire checkout experience. We take care of duties and taxes, and so on and so forth. It's a full end-to-end localization, but it doesn't stop there because it comes bundled with all the suite of services and operations that you need in order to actually execute the transaction.
So we will actually become the Merchant of Record, instead of the merchant, which means that we'll take upon us all the complexities of kind of compliance, duties and taxes, guarantees, foreign exchange exposures, all of that. Actually, for the merchant, it becomes also a fully localized transaction, not just for the shopper, and we actually take care of all the risks and complexities in between, and we don't even stop there because it's not just that we provide the merchant with all the set of capabilities and services. We also use our vast data set that comes from working for the last kind of 13, 12, 13 years with thousands of merchants across more than 30 different outbound markets, more than 200 inbound markets, and all the various kind of verticals, price points, and so on and so forth.
That gives us very unique data that we then use in order to create an optimized experience for every such combination, so the end result of that is, on average, around 40+% uplift in international conversion rates, coupled with zero hassle, zero risk, for the merchant. That's essentially the model. We work today with thousands of enterprise merchants, and many, many thousands of SMBs through a partnership that we have with Shopify. But we provide the back, kind of the white-label solution for what's called Shopify Managed Markets. Maybe we'll talk about it later. And just briefly, so we started as a small startup, three Co-Founders, sitting in the same room. We still sit in the same room until today. But the company has grown a bit. We're around 1,200 people spread across more than 25, I think, locations now. So, a truly global company. And yeah, I guess that's a quick overview.
All right. Awesome. Thanks, thanks for the overview. And, it's a fascinating story for sure. I guess maybe just, switching to Ofer for, for the next one. If we just look at, how you did in 2025, it's a year, with no shortage of headline volatilities. But I think you've been executing pretty steadily. I think maybe can you just, give us a recap of, your updated guidance and, what has been driving the GMV strength throughout the year? If you can just, if you can just start from there.
Sure. So, it has been on the one hand a year with a high level of uncertainty in the markets, geopolitical tensions, the tariff dynamics, and some economic question marks. But surprisingly, in terms of consumption trends and consumer behavior, it was a relatively stable year. If we compare it to 2024, 2023, we've seen less fluctuations. And overall, the trading patterns over the year have been good. We've seen solid trading throughout the year, and even slightly better trends in the second half of the year. So basically, that sort of drove growth of existing merchants as in recent years. As long as we are able to keep the merchants satisfied, create value for them, and they stay with us, we actually grow with them because e-commerce continues to grow faster than physical retail.
Cross-border and direct-to-consumer in particular grow a bit faster compared to other segments. Basically, we've seen that continuing in 2025. And again, good consumption behavior that continued also into the peak season. As you probably know, many of you, we issued a PR yesterday regarding November in general and more specifically, the volumes that we saw in Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend. Again, the numbers were very strong. In addition to that, we had a very good year in terms of new merchants onboarding. We had a good project pipeline, and it materialized very nicely throughout the year. Everything worked as planned. It was a quiet year, a relatively quiet year in terms of our project team. We've seen good contribution coming out of new merchants.
In some cases, we actually had positive surprises in terms of the volumes generated. I think one merchant that we can call out because they were vocal about it is Aritzia that launched recently with us. And I think they are very happy with the results. They've seen a nice uplift, and we've seen better numbers than we initially expected. So that's just one example. But we had a few of those. So generally speaking, to summarize, good trade patterns with existing merchants, successful new merchant joining throughout the year, basically that has been driving GMV.
All right. That's a perfect answer. Also, just, covered the holiday sales as well. So I appreciate that. I guess maybe turning to, Amir, if we look back at the past year, can you maybe discuss any changes to your go-to-market strategy and the sales process?
Sure. First of all, our go-to-market strategy has evolved quite considerably from when we started the company. For the first few years, it was mostly kind of outbound sales. But in the last few years, as we've grown in size and as we've kind of gathered what I think is a very impressive roster of clients and track record, we work today with some of the largest brands in the world. Adidas uses us for their international, Disney, Hugo Boss, SKIMS, Alo Yoga, all of these big brands. They base their international direct-to-consumer online activity on the Global-e service. That has enabled us to also create two strong go-to-market channels. One is also inbound. We don't just go outbound.
We actually get quite a few inbound leads from brands that just hear about us in the market or actually people moving from one company to another and kind of calling us to come in and help them do what we did for them in the previous company. But I think most importantly, more than 50% of our leads today are generated through channel partners. I think the great thing about our service is that it just creates more pie for everyone because we enable these direct-to-consumer international sales in a way that no single provider can. So all of the, you know, if it's logistics providers, we work with more than 30 different logistics providers, more than 10 different payment providers, you know, fraud providers, et cetera. All this vast ecosystem also feeds us with leads.
And some, with some of them, we have kind of a strategic agreement to do that, and they get compensated for that. Some of them do that without being specifically compensated for that, because it just creates more business for them. And that has really enabled, I would say, a very strong and robust go-to-market motion over the last few years. Today, we're also in the last couple of quarters, taking the outbound reach a notch up, using AI.
We've actually spent the last few months building kind of a custom build UI-based tool, agentic UI-based tool that kind of takes multiple data sources, kind of qualifies the leads, and enriches them with data in the unique way that is relevant for us and sizes them, sizes the opportunity, based on our kind of know-how and expertise that we've fed into the model. Essentially, we believe that it's currently being deployed, and we believe it can further accelerate quite considerably the top-of-the-funnel generation. Then a second agent, which is in the making, that will automate the kind of tailored and customized outreach to these deals.
So we believe that, over the next, kind of, year, plus, we can use that to further accelerate the go-to-market motion because our, I think the one of the most interesting things about our market is that it's not just that we are the by far leader in the market. There are not that many players out there, anyhow. But, actually, the market itself is, per our estimates, around 90% greenfield. So, it's more a matter of how efficiently and how quickly we can get to those merchants, qualify them as opportunities, and get them through the funnel.
All right. That's a very, very awesome recap of the go-to-market strategy and also, like, where it's evolving. I guess maybe a related topic on the agentic commerce. I think maybe more from the perspective of the merchant interaction with the shoppers. How's the company positioned for the agentic commerce age?
Sure. So, I think when you look at agentic commerce, we actually break it into three. So there are two parts that are, I would say, already happening today, and we're seeing them. It's happening on a very small scale, but we are already seeing some initial sparks of kind of assisted checkout, people using AI-powered browsers in order to assist them in the checkout process. And also just referrals, kind of people using, you know, mostly ChatGPT from our traffic info, but using ChatGPT to kind of discover products, discover brands. That's already happening right now. That's natively supported. It doesn't matter for us where the, you know, where the browsing process started or where which browser is used to do the checkout. It anyhow flows through our integration into those websites and through our rails. It's very, very, very small scale.
It's almost meaningless right now. But we do expect it to grow over time as people, as consumers, will probably use more of these tools in the future. In terms of kind of instant integrated checkout, kind of people checking out on ChatGPT or other AI platforms, that is currently not really in the market. There are some initial trials on a domestic level. When it comes to international, this is currently out of scope for all these platforms because of all the complexities that are involved that I mentioned earlier. We are in discussions with both the platforms, and we plan to also discuss that directly with the various AI providers once it's relevant, once the market starts to you know think about the pipe, how the piping should work behind the scenes.
But anyhow, the value proposition that we bring to the table is essential for those transactions as well. Just like, neither the merchant nor the platform wants to be the merchant of record for these international transactions and solve all of these compliance risks, complexity issues. Neither do the AI providers. So it's more a matter of how the piping will shape up behind the scenes, in order for us to provide these services for either side, the platform or the AI provider, because we believe both of them will still play a vital role in these kind of integrated checkout scenarios in the future.
All right. Awesome. Maybe let's turn to 2026. And maybe can you start with sharing a little bit of your priorities for 2026 operationally or strategically? And then, from a GMV perspective, I know it's too early to talk about the 2026 specific numbers, but what do you think are some of the key growth drivers for 2026? And maybe that's a better one for Ofer?
Sure. So, I think that, looking into 2026, our priorities have not shifted much. We continue to work hard to earn the trust of our merchants because this is basically the foundation of our growth. We will continue to do that. If we look at a sort of more granular view, we are pushing harder in APAC. We've been doing that in the last few years. We are seeing good results out of APAC. APAC is growing more than its share in our portfolio. We are focusing on Japan, South Korea, Australia, but we also see merchants out of Hong Kong and Taiwan lately. That's an important focus from us in terms of geographies. In terms of propositions, we continue to optimize for the merchants.
So, as many of you know, we have developed the multi-local solution in recent years, and I think that we will continue to see more of that. We are doing a lot to add value to merchants around the tariff dynamics, and we will continue to try and help merchants optimize for that, if it's the B2C solution or and/or duty drawback solutions for merchants. So this is something that we'll definitely continue to focus on, going into 2026. I think we've already mentioned our Managed Markets. So it's a very important area for Managed Markets as well, as hopefully we can sooner rather than later, and this is eventually Shopify's decision, relaunch the Managed Markets or what we call the V2 of Managed Markets.
It's actually already live and running, but it's sort of a testing phase, and hopefully we can get that up and running sooner rather than later. So I think those are sort of our product priorities going into the year. And in terms of financials, I think that we will continue and prioritize bottom-line growth. So we have different businesses with different sort of financial profiles. But we always prioritize growth, but specifically with a focus on sort of bottom-line dollar growth.
And I think that this will continue to be a significant KPI for us in 2026. Generally, referring to sort of what we expect to see in terms of numbers going into 2026, so we haven't guided for the year yet. We'll do that in the next earnings release. However, we do believe that we are on track to achieve our long-term targets that we've presented in the investor day earlier this year in New York, and we very much believe that we are on track to get there.
All right. That's great. And maybe just a quick follow-up on 2026. From your current sales and implementation pipeline perspective, what do you think the merchant cohort is going to look like compared to this year where you have probably fewer of those mega merchants joining?
Yeah. I think when we look at the pipeline, it's looking very, very healthy going into 2026. It's right where we wanted it to be across all the levels, so first of all, the pipeline of merchants that have already signed during the year but are planned, are in integration, and are planned to go live at the beginning or the first part of next year, so that's looking very healthy. Our project teams are very busy working on getting these merchants live and on time like they did for the core of merchants that went live this year before the holiday season before the kind of code freeze.
In addition, when we look at our what we call advanced discussions pipeline, so basically merchants that are in our funnel at a stage where we've already engaged with them, there've been multiple discussions, they've seen a demo, it's kind of progressing through the pipeline, that's looking very, very healthy, as well. We have, over the years, developed pretty good kind of experience and statistics about how much, how many of these brands will actually end up being kind of signed.
Some of these will still contribute if they sign early enough in 2026. They can already go live within the year and contribute at least partially to 2026. The rest will contribute to 2027 in the same kind of multi-year motion. All in all, a very healthy-looking pipeline. As I mentioned earlier, we're also taking very kind of interesting actions, I think, in order to feed the top of the funnel to make sure that it remains strong, if not stronger, for the following years using capabilities that kind of modern LLMs are giving us today that weren't available a year or two years ago.
All right. Awesome. And then looking longer term beyond 2026, what are some areas are you most excited about in terms of new deals, verticals, or any adjacent markets?
Sure, so first of all, it's almost sounds boring, but it's very exciting for us just to look at the potential. I mentioned briefly earlier that we believe that around 90% of the market is still greenfield, and that's the majority of that is still in markets that we're already established in. You know, markets like I'm talking about outbound markets like, you know, here in the U.S. or North America in general, continental Europe, the U.K., kind of places where we're already established, we've been working for many, many years, and still there is massive potential. I think the beauty of it is that the potential keeps on growing because we are sitting on the, I would say, a combination of three secular trends that are all pointing in our direction.
So, as you all know, commerce continues to go online. These days it feels like everybody's buying everything online, but it's actually not true. E-commerce still has a lot of share to gain from the general commerce pie over kind of physical retail. In addition, the motion of brands and consumers is to go as much as possible direct to consumer and kind of disintermediate the transactions. So, the Holy Grail for brands is to sell directly to their shoppers and gain that kind of direct relationship. And also shoppers are increasingly looking to buy directly from the brands that they like and gain access to the, you know, the full assortment of products and all the options and a better price, typically. So that's pointing in our direction as well.
In addition, for most, if not all, of the brands that have some kind of brand equity, international is the most important growth area and the place where they can leverage their brand equity in ways that are more difficult in their domestic market where the competition is much higher, and it's easier for people to kind of attack and gain share from them. That means that we do still plan to devote a lot of resources and attention to just continuing to grow in, based on our reputation and our track record, in the markets that we already established in. In addition, as Ofer mentioned, APAC is doing very well for us. When we IPO'd four and a half years ago, APAC was just a business development line in our prospectus.
Nowadays, APAC is already commanding a sizable share, almost 10% and kind of outpacing that in terms of kind of pipeline and new merchants going live. So that's a very exciting motion for us. Managed markets, which again Ofer mentioned, we think that it has over the next few years a lot of potential to become a multi-billion-dollar GMV business by itself, and a lot of the value-added services that we are working on, some of them are already live, but we are continuing to develop them, like the Borderfree.com-based demand generation platform that we are building, like duty drawback, which is a service that we keep on adding capabilities to and developing.
All of these, we think over 2026 and onwards, will kind of further augment the already very wide suite of services that we provide to our merchants and continue to generate more and more value to our existing merchants and the new merchants that are joining the platform. So lots, lots to be excited about for the next few years, and I think we're in kind of the pole position to grab more and more of this exciting market.
All right. That's awesome. I guess with the one or two minutes left, I just wanted to quickly hit on Shopify. I feel like we can't end this session without hitting Shopify, but I think that's kind of almost more into a separate breakout session. But I guess just to recap, what's your overall expectations of the Shopify agreement changes on your bottom line? And then on the 3P side, any change in your enterprise sales motion, with the Shopify merchants specifically? And I think actually from your press release, I've seen some of the large Shopify merchants joining as well in the recent quarters and pretty much every quarter.
Right. So, maybe just I'll start with the second part very quickly, and then let Ofer explain the implications on our economics. But generally speaking, there is no change to go-to-market on the enterprise side, on the 3P side of our agreement with Shopify has always been our own go-to-market. We did receive some interest from Shopify from time to time, but it's basically our go-to-market. So, given that, our win rates against the very few enterprise-level providers out there are super high, anyhow, even on other platforms where we never had any exclusivity where it's an even playing field, we don't expect and we don't see any change in our competitive positioning on Shopify even after the new agreement where we switch from being kind of the exclusive provider in Shopify to the preferred provider. So basically no real change in the go-to-market or our positioning. And I'll let Ofer describe the changes from an economic perspective.
Yeah. So, from an economic perspective, there are sort of two changes on the 3P side. It's very simple and straightforward. As we moved from exclusivity to preference, we also have updated rev share. We pay Shopify rev share for every dollar that goes through Shopify merchants. And this is the new rev share is lower to reflect the change from exclusivity to preference. And this will have a positive impact on our bottom line, which is already reflected in the Q4 guide because kicked in towards the end of Q3. In terms of managed markets, it's a bit more complicated. As we are in the V2, the new version, we are utilizing Shopify payments as the payment processor, or the payment gateway, for managed markets. The structure of our P&L will change soon, once the V2 is up and running and we see volumes there.
Basically, on the V2, we will recognize only our share of the revenue. Currently, we recognize the entire services revenue. On the fulfillment side, there's no change. But on the services side, we will recognize only our share of the revenue. But at the same time, we currently pay out of our S&M line a rev share to Shopify, and this will disappear from our P&L. So the structure will change, a significantly lower services take rate. But on the other hand, a large expense would go away. In terms of bottom line, there won't be a big difference. It will be slightly diluted for us, but we don't expect significant impact there. I'm just reminding everyone that this currently represents approximately 4% of our GMV, just to put it in context.
All right. Perfect. With that, please join me in thanking Amir and Ofer for all the color today. We look forward to the exciting development over the next year and many years ahead. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Chris.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, everyone.