Hello, and welcome to the VTEX Third Quarter 2022 Financial Results. My name is Elliot, and I'll be coordinating your call today. If you would like to register a question during the presentation, you may do so by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand over to our host, Julia Vater Fernández. The floor is yours. Please go ahead.
Hello everyone and welcome to the VTEX Earnings conference call for the quarter ended September 30, 2022. I'm Julia Vater Fernández, Investor Relations Director for VTEX. Our senior executives presenting today are Geraldo Thomaz, Founder and Co-CEO, and Ricardo Camatta Sodré, Chief Financial Officer. Additionally, Mariano Gomide de Faria, Founder and Co-CEO, and Andre Spolidoro, Chief Financial Officer, will be available during today's Q&A session. I would like to remind you that management may make forward-looking statements relating to such matters as continued growth prospects for the company, industry trends and products and technology initiatives. These statements are based on currently available information and our current assumptions, expectations and projections about future events. While we believe that our assumptions, expectations and projections are reasonable in view of the current available information, we caution not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements.
Certain risks and uncertainties are described on the Risk Factors and Forward-Looking Statement sections of VTEX Form 20-F for the year ended December 31st, 2021, and other VTEX filings within the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which are available on our investor relations website. Finally, I would like to remind you that during the course of this conference call, we may discuss some non-GAAP measures. A reconciliation of those measures to the nearest comparable GAAP measures can be found in our third quarter 2022 earnings press release available on our investor relations website. Now let me turn the call over to Geraldo. Geraldo, the floor is yours.
Thank you Julia. Welcome, everyone, and thanks for joining our third quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Last quarter, we shared three key focuses for the company. Continue helping our customers outperform the market, keep improving our gross margin, and optimize our expenses to gain operational efficiencies. Most importantly, all of that while we continue to deliver our high growth plans. With that in our north, let's deep dive on our operational performance this quarter. We're excited to announce that our business continues to deliver robust growth, solidifying our position as a regional leader while also building momentum outside of Latin America. A clear demonstration of our robust growth is that in Q3, our GMV growth accelerated to 29% year-over-year, both in USD and FX neutral.
Given our blue-chip enterprise customer base, VTEX customers continue to outperform the market consistently, a long-term historical trend that we have been highlighting with more emphasis for the last three quarters. Not only did the GMV and top line come stronger than expected, but also both our costs and expenses came below as a result of a leaner and more agile organizational structure. Our non-GAAP subscription gross margin increased by 560 basis points year-over-year. The margin expansion trend that started in the H2 of last year is a reflection of gradual code optimization, migration to more efficient servers, operating systems and processors, optimizations of non-core cloud providers, as well as operational leverage on our personnel support costs.
Although there could be some gross margin volatility as we migrate non-core cloud providers, there's still a long road ahead of us on gross margin improvements, and we are excited about what should come in the medium and long term. We plan to continue optimizing our cost base, while at the same time pushing our service levels up to provide the best solution for our customers. I'm extremely proud of what our team has accomplished on the expenses side. As anticipated in our previous earnings call, we delivered significant operational leverage. Our team's efforts enable us to continue growing our top line at a robust pace, which is our main objective as a high-growth company, while still finding incremental opportunities to operate our business with a leaner and more agile structure. Now moving to our commercial update. In the third quarter, we continued attracting premier brands and retailers.
Some new customers that went live this quarter that didn't have online store presence in the respective countries before were Fiesta B2B in Brazil and ASICS in Peru. Additionally, new customers that migrated from other platforms and went live this quarter were Levi's in Argentina, Vivara in pharma delivery in Brazil, Belcorp in Colombia and Chile, Chedraui in Mexico, Claro in Peru, The Foschini Group in South Africa, and Double H Candy in the U.S. On top of that, we continue building and strengthening sticky relationship with our existing customers. Some premier brands and retailers that expanded their operation with us by opening new stores in new countries during the third quarter were H&M, adding a store in Uruguay, currently operating in five countries in Latin America, Motorola adding a store in Saudi Arabia, currently operating in 19 countries across the world with more than 20 stores.
Whirlpool adding a store in Germany, currently operating in 16 countries across the world with more than 30 stores. In the third quarter, VTEX was named a visionary in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce report. This industry recognition follows the result we shared in the first quarter of this year with customer recognition in the 2022 Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer digital commerce report, where VTEX was named a strong performer. Additionally, in July of this year, Paradigm B2B released its early combined reports, in which it evaluates e-commerce providers across key areas of interest in the B2B technology buyer. In 2022, VTEX was awarded medals in each one of the 12 categories that Paradigm assessed in the mid-market edition, with gold medal for exceptional performance or capability in marketplace, promotional management, and customer service and support.
VTEX was the only vendor awarded a gold medal for marketplace capabilities and scored silver medals awarded to vendors with superior capability in site search, ability to execute, total cost of ownership, and vision and strategy. We're grateful and humble about the recognition from our multinational customers expanding their relationship with us, opening new stores, as well as from market experts such as Gartner and Paradigm. This give us the confidence and strength to continue pushing further with our strategic plan. We stay committed to continue executing with excellence and precision our vision. As we always say, we know we cannot do all this alone. We are certain that the multiplying forces of collaboration from the ecosystem we've built around VTEX will continue to enable and to unlock even greater outcomes. We will continue consistently nurture and expand those relationships.
Aligned with our payment partnership strategy and the further monetization of our ecosystem, we're excited to announce that we launched a partnership with Checkout.com, a global payment service provider and leading fintech in EMEA, able to deal with the most relevant international and local payment methods as well as digital wallets. They are a resourceful solution, especially in new markets for VTEX, like North America, Europe, Middle East, and Asia. Checkout.com's partnership agreement will enable international and local payment methods, nurturing a vast and solid ecosystem of partners and solutions, and promoting better conversion for our enterprise customers. Additionally, a couple of quarters ago, we launched news of our partnership with AWS. We are now happy to share that more than supporting VTEX, AWS is actively enabling our global expansion.
As we become one of their preferred global partners, we're excited to announce that Belcorp is one customers, among others, that went live with us in the third quarter, thanks to this partnership. We are extremely excited about this positive momentum, and VTEX is really looking forward to continue unlocking the potential of this partnership as AWS is also committing themselves to invest along with us in our global expansion, especially in Europe. Great things yet to be done. Before wrapping up, I'd like to share with you some customer success stories as their success speaks volumes more than any other data points. We don't innovate in a vacuum, and for us, seeing how our four guiding pillars are helping our customers achieve their goals is more than fulfilling. Let me go straight to it.
The Foschini Group, one of the biggest fashion retailers in South Africa, with more than 4,000 stores, 29 brands, and operations in 26 countries, is now operating with VTEX gradually rolling out their brands, which are expected to increase over time. With our solution, they will be able to centralize their 29 brands into a main marketplace, customizing the login process for their end users, providing a frictionless consumer experience, while at the same time helping them to have a single source of truth for their multi-brand sales process. We're more than pleased to welcome them to VTEX family. We're confident that we're going to do amazing things together. ERIK'S Bike Board & Ski, one of the largest bike shops in the U.S. with more than 30 physical stores across the country, chose VTEX to deliver superior shopping experience to their online consumers.
VTEX worked hand in hand with ERIK'S Bike Board & Ski to do a complete revamp of their homepage, and as a result, our customers benefited not only from higher stickiness of the website, which was reflected in lower bounce rates and higher number of page views per visitors, but also with a double-digit improvement in their conversion rates, session durations, and number of page views per user. Finally, their average order value almost doubled. Adding, the leading textile and retail clothing company in Latin America with more than 800 stores, chose VTEX headless approach to provide their end users with the best purchasing experience across all channels. Proprietary stores, franchisees, multi-branded stores, e-commerce, as well as additional sales channels such as Facebook and Google Shopping.
With us, Adding benefited from consistent improvement in all their websites' performance metrics such as page speed times, conversion rate, average stick times, bounce rates, and cart abandonment rates, among others. Motorola U.S., a pioneer in the mobile phone industry, optimized with VTEX the product detail page experience, keeping the look and feel while achieving efficiencies for the page loading time. We're happy to share that together we've been able to achieve an overall page load time improvement of 45% and 54% for desktop and mobile respectively, reaching an average time of one to two seconds. Motorola now has active online stores in 19 countries operating with VTEX and continue expanding to new geographies. This year, they expanded to EMEA and Asia Pacific, leveraging our marketplace architecture. Blurring the lines between physical and digital commerce, we continue to see customers implementing our Endless Aisle solution.
This quarter, we had companies such as Samsung and ZAGG adopting this new way that enables their physical stores to sell products from other stores, franchisees, and their commerce operations to enhance conversion in their physical stores. Social commerce continued to show a strong fit for enterprises to meet and sell to consumers, both from their preferred social media channels or at the discovery stage of the product in live shopping events. Belcorp, a multilevel marketing beauty and personal care company, present in 13 countries and with three commercial brands, is already a heavy user of this feature, which was one of the many reasons they decided to come to VTEX. We believe that offering this product can become an interesting engine for growth and VTEX adoption as we position ourselves as innovation frontrunners across the globe. This quarter, we also had an important milestone.
We hosted our first event in Mexico, VTEX Connect LATAM. The event took place in Mexico City on September seventh, gathering more than 3,000 in-person attendees and with the participation of 65 speakers from 11 countries. We're proud to have hosted the largest e-commerce event in the country, which we believe marks a watershed moment for VTEX positioning in the country and in the region. Wrapping up the operational update section, I would like to thank our 1,405 VTEXers that are working to fulfill our mission as well as our customers, partners, and investors. Now I'll turn the call to Ricardo so he can cover our financial progress report for the quarter.
Thank you Geraldo. Hi everyone. It's a pleasure to be here updating you on our financial performance for the third quarter of 2022. As highlighted by Geraldo, our Q3 GMV performance accelerated to 29% growth year-over-year, both in U.S. dollars and FX neutral. This is a clear demonstration of the resiliency of our blue-chip customer base, and that we continue to help our customers to outperform the market. Breaking our GMV performance down in more details, in Q3 our existing customers' same-store sales went up to the high teens, demonstrating a robust performance in a market that's currently delivering flattish to single-digit growth rate. Also, it's important to note that some countries such as Mexico, the U.S., and Europe grew at a stronger pace than the company's average.
While more mature regions such as Brazil are still growing at a robust pace, just slightly below the overall company average. We expect these new regions to continue to compound and contribute to VTEX's high growth performance. This quarter, our revenue increased to $38.8 million, a year-over-year increase of 22% both in U.S. dollars and FX neutral. Subscription revenue reached $36.5 million in the third quarter of 2022 from $29.6 million in the same quarter last year, a year-over-year increase of 23% both in U.S. dollars and FX neutral. This quarter, subscription revenue accounted for 94% of total revenue versus 93% in the same quarter last year. Non-GAAP subscription gross profit was $26.9 million compared to $20.2 million in the third quarter of 2021.
Non-GAAP subscription gross margin was 73.8% in the third quarter of 2022, compared to 72.5% last quarter and 68.2% in the same quarter of 2021. The 560 basis points year-over-year margin expansion shows the commitment of our team to keep improving our margins. This margin improvement was mostly driven by the migration of non-core services to more efficient hosting providers and the optimization and operational leverage of our support cost. We are more than proud about what we achieved in these fronts, and we are excited about what's to come. We've also continued improving our non-GAAP services gross margin, resulting in an even higher non-GAAP gross margin expansion, 670 basis points year-over-year, to be precise.
Our non-GAAP total operating expenses decreased to $32.4 million in the third quarter of 2022, from $43.3 million in the prior quarter and $32.8 million in the same period last year. This is a reflection of the organizational restructuring we made last quarter, plus additional areas of leverage our teams were able to find. As a result of the better than expected margin improvement, with the top line coming at a strong and robust pace, our non-GAAP operating income improved from a -41.6% margin in the same quarter last year to a -15.5% margin in the third quarter of 2022. This represents a 26.1 percentage point improvement year-over-year.
As of the three months ended September 30, 2022, VTEX had a negative $3.3 million free cash flow compared to negative $12.7 million in the prior quarter and negative $10.7 million free cash flow in the third quarter of 2021. Now, before I move to the outlook for the fourth quarter in the fiscal year 2022, I would like to update you on our share repurchase program we approved in August of this year. As of September 30, 2022, the remaining balance available for share repurchases under this authorization is almost $25 million. We purchased slightly less than 1.3 million shares at an average price of $4 per share. We expect to continue executing our plan based on the evaluation of market conditions and applicable legal requirements.
Moving on to our business outlook. Macroeconomic conditions remain uncertain. We continue to see the elongation of our sales cycle in the average time our new customers are taking to implement the VTEX platform. More recently, we are also seeing a slower GMV ramp up for new customers. Finally, during Q4, we will have for the first time the combination of the FIFA World Cup with the holiday shopping season, bringing additional uncertainty to the current macro scenario. Against this challenging backdrop, we are currently targeting revenue in the $46.0 million-$48.0 million range for the fourth quarter of 2022, implying a 27% year-over-year growth in U.S. dollars and 24% on a FX neutral basis in the middle of the range.
For the full year 2022, considering the incremental macroeconomic volatility, we reduce our FX neutral year-over-year revenue growth target to 23%-24%, implying a range of $158 million-$160 million based on October average FX rates. We are excited to continue contributing to our blue-chip customers digital transformation journey, helping them to accelerate their sales with the right set of tools and products. Our customer base continues to demonstrate their resiliency even through the uncertain times we are currently navigating. We are also honored by our customers continued trust in the VTEX platform, demonstrated by our stable annual revenue churn. This results in a resilient business model for VTEX that will continue to compound growth in a sustainable and ambitious way. With that, let's open it up for questions now. Thank you.
Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure your device is unmuted locally. Our first question comes from Marcelo Santos from JPMorgan. Your line is open.
Hi. Good evening. Thanks for the opportunity to make the question. I have two. The first question would be, given your margin performance, would there be room to anticipate the target of breaking even in the end of next year? Is there room to deliver this earlier? The second question would be, your guidance implies an acceleration in FX neutral terms for the fourth quarter. I think you grew 22% right on this quarter and the next year you're guiding for 24%. What are the drivers behind this acceleration? Thank you.
Hi Marcelo thanks for your question. Happy to take this one. We continue to be committed to reaching our positive non-GAAP operating income by the fourth quarter of 2023, as we mentioned in previous earnings call. We are a high growth company operating in an under-penetrated market with attractive unit economics and high switching costs. We will continue to prioritize growth. At the same time, we will operate in a lean and agile way, which, especially during uncertain times, can create a lot of value. Having said that, if there is any way for us to reach our break-even sooner without jeopardizing growth, we will be delighted to deliver on that. On the second question on the acceleration, yes, as you mentioned, we have been accelerating our growth.
If we look at the second quarter, we posted FX neutral revenue growth of about 20%, and then 22% now in Q3. If you look at our Q4 guidance, it's in the middle of the range implied a 24% FX neutral growth. As you probably remember, in the second quarter of 2021, there was a second wave of COVID, so it was a tough comp the second quarter of this year. That started to clean up a bit more in the third quarter. You see some of that acceleration. For this last quarter, we are seeing on the existing customer side the same-store sales going to the high teens level as I mentioned in the prepared remarks. Al so we are having new customers joining the platform and helping us with this additional acceleration. Hopefully that helps you on the question.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Great year.
We now turn to Andre Salles from UBS. Your line is open.
Hi. Hi Geraldo, Ricardo. Good evening everyone and thanks for taking my question. We noticed there was a decreasing headcount quarter-over-quarter. Could you give more clarity on that and potential implications on your business model? Should headcount decrease be expected going forward? I have an additional question. The figures that you presented were slightly above our expectations, but I believe it is worth asking here. We see a different growth dynamics between GMV and net revenue, which with net revenue a slightly lower growth pace than GMV. For the medium long term, should we expect these two variables to move closer? That would be it.
I'll be very happy to answer about the first one about the layoff. Thank you for the question. Yes, we are adjusting the company to the reality that we see in the market. We passed the pandemic. As we mentioned last quarter, the layoff was an adjustment to achieve our optimal structure to deliver the growth plan the best way possible. We decided to do this in the most responsible and respectful manner possible, and we did the necessary adjustment on the second quarter of 2022. We decided to do all at once and to turn the page on that matter. Over the last three months, we've found some additional opportunities to fine-tune and optimize even more the org structure, more around the edges.
We also had natural employee turnover. Some positions we're not seeing the need to refill. Some we will refill over time. We will keep our high bar on hiring. Refilling some positions might take some time, but we will. It is important to mention that we're a high-growth company. We will continue to invest to deliver our high growth plan. Currently we feel like we are well invested structure that can support our growth plan for some time with just some marginal additional investment. The head count that we have right now won't increase that much. Ricardo, could you help me on the second question, please?
Yes, Geraldo. Happy to. Regarding the dynamics of GMV versus revenue growth, before going into the details, it's important to recap that roughly 1/3 of our revenue is a fixed fee, and 2/3 is a take rate on our customer's GMV. Therefore, only 2/3 of our customers' GMV growth automatically flows through as revenue growth for us. In other words, as our share-of-success model, there is an automatic implied take rate decrease for our customers while we get more dollars out of them. It's a win-win setup. We do share some of our success with our customers in exchange for automatically surfing the increase in e-commerce penetration. If you divide our subscription revenue by our GMV, you see a slight increase in take rate quarter-over-quarter, but a slight reduction year-over-year.
This implied year-over-year take rate decrease is driven by mix and our share success model that I just explained. In other words, we are not seeing any like-for-like pricing pressure. Finally, I would also highlight that we are passing through inflation to our fixed fee portion of our contracts in most countries. This is more challenging to do in developed economies, but we have been doing it in Brazil, and we are starting to do it in some countries in LatAm, Brazil as well.
Got it. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Diego Aragão from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Yes. Good evening everybody. Thanks for taking my question. Actually, it's a follow-up on maybe Marcelo's question. Looking to the subscription gross margin, it is great to see that this metric is, you know, expanding consistently during the year. I guess my question is, how should we think about, you know, further operating efficiency and maybe what is really, you know, the cause here, what are the key drivers for it that could continue to change the subscription gross margin level going forward? I was just wondering if this is just because you are scaling up, you know, the VTEX platform in markets where you are either at the discovery or validation phase and moving those markets to the acceleration and scale phases, or is there any other reason behind it?
My second question is somewhat correlated to the first, as it seems that most of the incremental net operating margin gain in this quarter came from lower marketing and sales. Is this where most of the headcount reduction is reflected on? Also if you can give us some color on how to think about, you know, market and sales going forward, given that I would say that part of the future growth of the company should come from investments in this line item. Thank you.
Hello. Hello thank you. I'm very happy to answer that. First of all, the gross margin is very weakly linked to the expansion in other countries. We have a single infrastructure, single system that is shared across all the countries that we serve. It may impact the efficiency of sales, it may impact the sales efficiency, but it impacts very little the gross margin performance. The most relevant improvements on gross margin performance is related to hosting cost efficiencies, followed by support optimization. I will explain to you a little bit more. Just to recap, our hosting represents roughly two-thirds of our costs. Being efficient in this area has been a major focus for the company with great results so far.
When we talk about efficiency, I'm talking about migration to other processors from Intel to ARM to AWS Graviton. I'm also talking about transitioning some of our observability and logging software for logs from a solution that is third party to a solution that is more like almost created. Not created, but assembled by us using more open source. It's important to mention that as we perform the migration of our models and continue to work towards this hosting optimization, we might face some volatility in our margin structure, especially in the beginning of each migration when we are running two providers at the same time and adjusting the codes and processes. But most of this improvement in hosting itself is from hosting costs.
There's also on the support side, which represents roughly 1/3 of our cost, and this is mostly personnel. As we are increasing our revenue, we are not seeing the need to increase the teams as much. This might be in some ways linked to us getting a little bit bigger in this new country that we're exploring. The second question you had was the trade-off between growth and profitability, right? The decrease in headcount is mostly linked to the S&M sales and marketing area. The answer that I'll give you is a no.
I don't think this will jeopardize the potential future growth of VTEX for the next year or two or three years. The company is now optimized with optimizing our structure to continue to be high growth. You know, like, there is a change in the landscape that we're adapting to. I'll give you some historical context to illustrate my point. In 2019, we grew over 40% in FX neutral with a slightly positive free cash flow. In 2020, there was a surge, a huge demand, right, in commerce. We grew 95% in FX neutral with positive free cash flow equivalent to 10% of our revenue on that year. We accelerated our investments from the end of 2020 into the middle of 2022, this year. Now, we have adjusted our structure to match the e-commerce market growth, which is still very attractive and long-term in nature.
Given the, you know, because the low penetration and the digitalization of the industry in general. The growth that we saw in 2020 is not there. Companies like ours and like a lot of other companies, we didn't want to miss the growth momentum. Eventually we increased the size of our team more than the current and demand that we're seeing right now. I don't see us losing momentum in the growth given the current demand for the market.
That's very clear and very helpful, Geraldo Thomaz. Thank you very much for this. If I may just one more question. On your opening remarks, you mentioned a couple of, you know, new customers in the U.S., mentioning like Erik's Bike Board & Ski, which are quite interesting shop, by the way. But given how relevant this market could be for VTEX, can you just comment a bit more about, you know, the demand you are seeing in that market, maybe commenting on your pipeline and provide some colors, on the customer profile, for instance, if you think about like enterprise clients versus SMB clients? I think that would be great. Thank you.
For this, I would hand over the question to Mariano. Mariano is very on top of what is happening in the U.S. He might give nice answers.
In the U.S., We are seeing momentum in B2B. VTEX has a great offer of a B2B marketplace, and we are seeing good opportunities coming organically on a B2B. We are seeing also B2C demands. We can quote, as we mentioned, the Double H Candy, that's a group of Just Candy Ornament Shop. It is the same group. We are migrating all of them. We are seeing B2C and B2B. B2B midsize. Let's be more nailed down on that. B2C, we are seeing good momentum. Omnichannel B2C as well. 50-50, let's say.
Very clear Mariano. Thank you. Thank you.
We now turn to Clarke Jeffries from Piper Sandler. Your line is open.
Hi. Thank you for taking the question. You know, first question is, could you maybe review for us how the AWS partnership is structured, how they're going to market with your solution, and what really invest alongside you does that mean? Generally trying to get a sense of how a partner fits into even their own Amazon.com strategy.
Thank you for the question. Let me recap on the AWS partnership. Last year, we announced a multi-year collaboration agreement with them to deliver directly to consumer e-commerce solutions to global enterprises. AWS then included VTEX into their marketplace, communicated this partnership internally to their reps in Europe, in U.S., in Latin America. Their customers interested in digital commerce platform for B2C and B2B capabilities could choose VTEX. The sales team of AWS is matching effort with a VTEX solution engineering in the three continents. At the beginning, we were conservative in how the contribution to our operations would occur. The good news is that we are gaining more momentum and traction on this partnership. We are grateful for all the opportunities AWS collaborating with us in the field.
For instance, as mentioned by Geraldo in the prepared remarks, this quarter we had to go live with Belcorp, a customer that AWS and VTEX have worked together. Also B2B on Bridgestone is another case that we already announced that VTEX and AWS partners as well. It's coming along. We are optimistic for the future of the partnership. I believe that for Europe and U.S., it will be relevant.
All right. Thank you. Thank you very much. You know, Ricardo, maybe wondering if I could ask really for more color around how the new merchant, new region or new store pipeline has trended compared to your expectations. I mean, thinking through the growth algorithm, it sounds like high-teens same-store sales growth and larger customers is an improvement year-over-year. Just wondering how we should think about the other part of the equation, as we get to what seems to be an implied roughly 30% GMV growth for 2022.
Yeah. Hi Clarke. Happy to elaborate on that. As we have been talking over time in previous earnings calls, we'd like to look at our P&L separate by existing customers and new customers. We see these healthy dynamics with our existing customers and accelerating same-store sales, which is very good to see with very stable annual revenue churn. This is good news on the existing customers' P&L. On new customers P&L, we continue to see a strong demand for new customers. This demand has been more stable recently than accelerating. We continue to see strong demand for these new customers contributing to our overall growth. I would say on maybe 60/40, new customers, existing customers, something that's in that neighborhood, if that's helpful.
Yep. That's perfect. Thank you very much.
As a reminder, to ask any further questions, please press star one on your telephone keypad now. We now turn to Thiago Kapulskis from Itaú. Your line is open.
Hello everyone. Thanks for the opportunity to ask questions. I just have two follow-ups on the previous question. The first one, just to understand a little bit what's embedded in the guidance for Q4. I'm just asking this because you pretty much posted a beat, right, on your Q3 guidance. On the nominal numbers in U.S. dollars, for the full year, the guidance is lower versus the guidance you provided the last quarter, right? Just want to understand what exactly. It's just like FX. Is there any specifics to the World Cup or elections in Brazil, anything like in terms of deals? Just want to get a little bit of a sense of what's in here, or if you just want to be conservative because of the macro.
Any additional color on this would be interesting. The other question I have is on the gross margins, right? Because you're making a very good, you know, traction here. I know the environment for the cloud providers hasn't been that good, right? We saw this in AWS and Microsoft results, right? Just want to get a sense of this improvement is related 100% to the operating leverage they're getting from more volumes, or is there any sort of a renegotiation or even room actually to get lower prices due to the tougher environment that, you know, the cloud providers are having, you know, elsewhere? Thanks.
Yep. Happy to take the first question regarding the guidance and the dynamics there, and then I'll pass it over to Geraldo to talk about the gross margin and the drivers. On the guidance for Q4, right? As I mentioned, we continue to see an acceleration from Q2 - Q3 and then the middle of the guidance for Q4. However, having said that, as you mentioned, there was a beat for Q3 and it's not fully passing along to Q4. There is a slightly lower acceleration than we were expecting three months ago. Let me share some context on what we are seeing here.
Over the last two quarters, as we have been talking about, there is an elongation of our sales cycle, expressed by an increase in the average time our customers are taking to implement the VTEX platform. The dynamic has remained stable over the past couple quarters. It hasn't improved, but it also has not deteriorated. We've been also talking about the strong performance of our existing stores throughout the year compared to the overall e-commerce market. None of these factors impacted Q4 guidance, right?
You know, in addition to a challenging macro, and you mentioned some of the factors and the uncertainty of the FIFA World Cup during the holiday season, I would say that there is the new piece of information that we are starting to see a slightly longer ramp-up time for some of our new customers. This means that some of our new customers are taking longer than expected to reach their estimated level of sales, impacting the take rate portion of our revenue. We will continue to monitor these dynamics. At the end of the day, it's on our customer side to decide how many dollars to allocate to moving traffic to their e-commerce site once it goes live. That's the key factor driving this Q4 guidance and this uncertainty of the FIFA World Cup. We'll keep you updated on this trend.
About the gross margin, I can give some color here. I would say that there is some natural scale effect given we process more orders, we process more traffic, and eventually the gross margin gets a little bit better. This is not meaningful. This is not the reason why it got better. The other hypothesis that you brought is related to commercial conditions with the hosting providers. This is not the case for this year. We have long-term contracts with AWS, our hosting providers. We don't renegotiate all the time. This is something we do once in a while, and we didn't, not this year, not specifically.
Most of the increase of efficiency of our gross margin comes from R&D efforts. It's R&D that we spend to make one single service give the same amount of throughput of responses with a little bit less money spending on AWS. A little bit less resources spent on AWS or our hosting providers. This is, as we know during the pandemic, if you look to our history, our financial statement, you will see that in 2019 we had a good gross margin. You see that during the pandemic, in the beginning of the pandemic, our gross margin was better because of the volume.
There was a lot of features that we needed to develop for our customers and capabilities linked to the physical stores, routing the order to the physical store, including the physical store in the commerce experience. You see that our gross margin gets a little bit worse because our R&D efforts was like for the extra traffic that we were getting, extra requisites that we were getting. For this year, as we return to a normal path of growth, we have bandwidth to put some resources on our R&D to increase the efficiency, and we see the results. It's slowly. Very slow that we can do that. There's no silver bullet to solve the gross margin, but we can get a much better gross margin if we invest in R&D.
Great. No, thanks a lot for the color. Very helpful, guys. Thanks.
Thank you.
This concludes our Q&A. I'll now hand over to Geraldo Thomaz for final remarks.
The third quarter results have been achieved in a context of volatility and mixed macroeconomic performance globally. Under these circumstances, and considering the consistent strong delivery of results from all the VTEXes, it's clear to us the strong resiliency of our business model and customer base. This give us the conviction to continue to reliably execute our business plan. Also, it highlights the immense opportunity we have in front of us as e-commerce continues to penetrate the economies of Latin America countries and globally. VTEX is demonstrating a clear path to become a relevant global player. We are still in the early stages of our long journey, and we are more convinced than ever in the value we are creating in this omnichannel era. VTEX has great potential in the years to come. We are excited to continue executing to deliver on our vision.
Thank you everyone for joining us today. I'm looking forward to updating about our progress in our next earnings call.
Today's call is now concluded. We'd like to thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.