Wix.com Ltd. (WIX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Welcome to Wix's 2020 Management Update. My name is Maggie O'Donnell, and I'm the Director of Investor Relations here at Wix. I'd like to remind you all that during this event, we may make forward-looking statements, and these statements are based on current expectations and assumptions. Please consider the risk factors included in our most recent Form 20-F that could cause our actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. We do not undertake any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. Please refer to the safe harbor included in these management update slides for any further information. With that, I'd like to introduce Nir Zohar, our President and COO.

Thank you. Thank you, Maggie, and welcome, everyone. It's really great that you've all joined us. We know we spoke a lot about how 2020 really impacted Wix, and we had a great year, and we're going to cover more of it today. But I think 1 of the big downsides of this year is that we had much less chance to travel and to come and meet our shareholders and our investors and to talk to you directly. So we wanted to try kind of mid-December, do a recap of the year and try to talk to you live here from Tel Aviv, try to cover some of the big things that happened to us this year and talk about our excitement going forward. Definitely, 2020 was groundbreaking for us. We accelerated on all metrics. We are going to surpass the $1 billion of collections for the first time, surpassed by a lot. But for us, we feel as if we're just getting started. In our minds, we're building a category leader in what we perceive is a huge market, and we want to talk a little bit today about how we think about it and share our thoughts with you. So for our agenda today, we'll cover some of those topics. I'll be joined by Avishai and by David Schwartz, our VP of Product, and later on by Lior, and obviously, we will wrap up with the Q&A. It's -- clearly, we've been doing so many things that it will be hard for us to go over everything. We'll cover only some of what we've been doing. We are trying to focus on the things that we feel need more clarity or can get value from us kind of tying the note. If you have something that you feel that we are not covering, obviously, first of all, it doesn't mean that it's not important, and we'd love to answer any questions at the end, at the Q&A. So with that, I would like to redirect the camera to my friend, Co-CEO -- Co-Founder and CEO, Avishai Abrahami. Avishai?

Hey, How are you doing?

I'm doing good, and you?

Very good, very good.

We're going to talk about how 2020 was amazing for Wix, but this was a pretty big year for you personally.

Indeed, it was -- finally, I'm a father. So I have a 5 years -- 5 months old daughter now. I'm learning the hassles of how to run a family.

And from those first 5 months, if you need to assess what's more complex, running a family or dealing with a 5 months old baby or dealing with the company, which one?

So my baby tend seem to cry a lot. She put herself to sleep. She'll sleep all night. And when she does cry, it's one person. In Wix, it's 4,500 people that cry. So without a question, running a company is much more complex. I think especially if you have the right money for your daughter, right, she can solve all those issues.

I'm totally on board with that. So we're at the end of 2020, it was a great year. We talked about it a lot. For you, when you think about it, when you try to summarize the year, like what was the most outstanding part of the year?

So obviously, right. It was not a standard year, right? We have the pandemic. And I think that, again, for me, it was an amazing experience to be in a place where we actually have saved millions of businesses, right? We've seen people that the business would not have survived, the way that they make their live would drive them to make -- they're able to pay in the grocery store is because of the business and that business without Wix will not exist today. And I think that was amazing to see that influence that we have. Another amazing thing happened that I found to be very inspiring is that a lot of government states, cities use Wix to coordinate a lot of what they do in order to handle the pandemic and send information, track with sync. And again, that was amazing because I think there's very likely we're also save the -- help saving lives. And that's very unique. Beyond that, it was an exciting year for Wix, of course, because of the growth by the pandemic, but also because we released a huge amount of new things during the last part of '19 and during this year. And I think that combined together, they created this massive growth and really a completely new way of people using Wix or using the Internet.

So far, and we still have a month to go, we added more than 29 million users this year, which is fantastic.

We're going to get to 30 million, right, however.

We will get to 30 million.

Over 30 million in 1 year.

And that's, I think, part of the fact that it's amazing growth. I think that it also really empowers that sense, the things that we've seen, the trend of moving online, we see it happening for many years now. But this is not really a new thing. It's just a super acceleration of something that was already happening.

Obviously, I mean, my parents, for example, never bought anything online. Now they do all of their shopping online. And now on this, they get used to that, right, they'll continue to do it because it's more comfortable. And we're seeing that all across the board, not just with my parents, right? And people are just so much more into doing things on the Internet from shopping also to getting personal training, to be talking to their consultant, to the psychologist, a huge amount of things. Before it'd be almost all of them offline. And now online, and probably going to stay a big part of them online, past the pandemic.

So I know you have a huge amount of excitement for how this rolls out and how this builds up for us as a business and as a product going forward. I do want to just kind of try and mention, cover some of the things we've done in the past year. So if you turn to -- if you guys turn to the slide here, you can see just -- it's a huge list, but it's actually a partial list of all of the things that happened this year. And obviously, it's a lot of enhancements and improvements we've done to the platform in order to support all of those people coming online through the pandemic, making -- changing the restaurants who wanted to move online and stores who wanted to move online and services that now needed to have -- to be much more in line, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But also lot of core enhancements to our strategic products, the release of Editor X, the improvements to the speed of the Wix websites, the performance, the advanced SEO tools that we released and many, many more. I would say that from my point of view also, I think that one of the biggest things that happened this year is that on the operational side, even though we had all this hardship and working from home and not meeting people and not being able to run off the regular rituals that we have and then needing to look for talent online and onboard and recruit online and on board online, we still managed to gain a huge amount of growth in our head count, in our talent, not only in care, which we mentioned a couple of times throughout the year, but also in R&D, which I think -- it really helps us go deeper into investing into all of those growth opportunities as we go into 2021 and beyond. So Wix, I think without a doubt, we are -- we've managed to really create a huge global brand with much strength around the DIY and building websites. But I think that when people are looking at this list, for us, it's very easy to understand how everything connects together. But I think it's actually valuable to do a zoom out for a minute and try to explain to everyone, how do we think about it.

So -- and one of the things that -- we built 3 editors, right? And the other question I get is, isn't that too much? How is it all combined, right, which is what we discussed. And the thing about Wix is that all of the editors are using the same infrastructure. So in fact, if we improve cashing here, right, all of the 3 of them are enjoyed, if this is something secured, if this is in databases, all of them are enjoying that. So in fact, we build most of the thing just once and then just do a layer, which is the editor, and that is very different, right? We have the ADI, which is remote casual user -- classic editor which is pretty much for everybody who want to build their own website. And then Editor X, which is really a super designers, agencies and interprofessional tool. And when we build, for example, a vertical or build store, we build a booking, right? Again, we do it once. And then we can plug it into all 3 editors. It's actually done automatically using a plug-in model, which is in vertical in all 3 of them. And this allows us to do a couple of things. First of all, when we launched Editor X, it was not an easy product. It was not a product that is doing just that. It actually -- all of this incredible functionality, which is super strong infrastructure, and then all of the business application, right, that it took us many, many years to develop, right? And that's on the 1 side. On the other side, it also enable us to continue and innovate quickly, right? We're a product company. The thing that make us always grow faster and better is our ability to innovate. And most companies when they grow beyond a size, the certain size, they start to slow the innovation. In Wix what we're seeing is that it actually accelerates. In this architecture where we actually have an infrastructure and then the separate editors and then the plug-in architecture and then a plug actually for web components is what enable us to continue to innovate quickly going forward and not really spend so much effort in developing each 1 of those 3 editors.

I think that's fantastic. And you talk about how that drives velocity and innovation and more products within the company. But what does it mean also when you think about the developer community and the people out there work with Wix?

So if you think about it, right, when you -- we're allowing people to build a website, right? To build a website, it's their infrastructure from now on, right? It's no longer our infrastructure. We build the infrastructure, and they're consuming it from us. And this means that you can pretty much every year, you can do more on to Wix. And you can use this incredible infrastructure that nobody else is actually giving you to be able to use. AWS and Google Cloud give you a way to have a managed server. But they don't manage your security. They don't do the cashing. They don't do all those things that you need in order to sustain a business. And we can see how many sites do we see being hacked every day. Every day, you hear about some big company that somebody just went in and stole the data and is now blackmailing them. And what we essentially do is that we give you this super strong infrastructure, allowing you to build almost anything in any way you want on top of it. And if you look 5 years from today, I believe that this will be an infrastructure where a huge part of the Internet will be built on top of it, enjoying the benefits of having something that is -- that you have -- well, over 10 years now of engineers, working on making it super safe, super fast, super -- right, super stable.

That's -- I think, that's a huge vision.

Well, that's what we want to achieve, right? We want to be able to be in the place where you can build any dream that you have on the Internet on our infrastructure with our tools.

So I think that maybe we can take one of those pieces and actually try and break it down. And how about we go and touch the newcomer, Editor X. So why Editor X? I Think that's the original question.

So when we look at the market today, right, we believe that there is about 3 million -- 30 million people that develop website in some capacity, right? Some of them do it for their friends and families and have a dozen websites and some are super professional agencies that do hundreds websites, some do really high brands. But the population that we can identify today is about 30 million. We noticed that we have about -- today on Wix, we have about 270,000 of those on Wix. So there's a huge opportunity, right? It's a huge gap, and we believe we can capture that gap. And if we look, right, at the growth of that population on Wix, and you can see that it's always accelerating, right? And that's amazing. It means that we're actually able to do more and work with this population more and actually achieve growth in that. Now this population is very important because of a couple of reasons. First of all, they set the trends. Why it is popular on the Internet? How it should look? And the other thing is, from our perspective, in terms of business line, right? It's compounded growth, why? Because every one those of users are building multiple sites. So if you had one of them, right, you pay acquisition once, over the next couple of days, we're going to get many websites from them. And so this is the target that we set to ourselves. And there is a reason -- another reason why we went there is that we kind of look at the competitive landscape, right, and as we look at the competitive landscape, you can see that on the right side, you have design tools, then you have Squarespace, and WordPress.org, and none of them give you the full capabilities of what you need, right? Figma and Adobe XD are amazing tool for design but you cannot publish on them. You need to have a developer take that and record it from 0. What you did is just the -- how it should look, right, and not actually building the website. If you look at WordPress.org, then you don't have design capabilities, you still need a developer, right? And it's a huge effort and maintenance and securities are a nightmare. If you look at Squarespace, it has some basic design capabilities not what professional designers need. And very, very limited business applications. So if you want to do anything a bit more complex, you just can't do it. So we felt that Editor X is giving you everything. You can design super professional tools. In fact, you can probably design in Figma, then copy it to Editor X, and just have that design there. From there, with one click, you can publish it, you have an amazing business application and really give the agency, the ability to control their own fate with our developers, the old cycle on one platform. I think this is exciting, and we can actually see that, as you show in the graph before, the adoption actually proves that it is exciting.

It's a new product, right?

It is a new product.

And we just released it. The user was starting to build things with it. I know you always go and speak and want to learn what the users are doing, especially with something new. What have you seen?

So from professional designer, the excitement is, by far, better than any that we've seen before. It really -- people really are amazed that now they can do so much. And one of the -- and I'm going to share some stories here. It's okay. So those are really sample stories. I think shows some of the coupling that I like. So this is a [ Piranha ], it's an agency based in New York. And they joined us, right, in February, right? And that enabled them only because of Editor X. And you can see they're building super high brands, right? It's Ferrari, it's Saint Laurent, it's amazing brands, right? And in fact, they also build their own website now on Editor X, which just goes to show, right, that they take it as a super professional tool that they can use. They are based in New York and really super cool project to see. And I see all these big brands on their website, essentially, they're the ones who are bringing those huge brands to Wix?

So now we have these big brands actually starting to exist on our platform.

Yes, yes. Exactly. This is exactly what is happening. So now you are starting to have those massive companies because they work with agencies, right? Most of them don't have their own in-house development. So they work with agencies, and now when the agencies are using, it's time of get those massive brands on Wix. Another example, right? Again, this is a company that was -- an agency that was already on Wix, right? And -- but then started to have Editor X, now they're also doing Editor X website. They have about 16 Editor X website already on Wix. In fact, they only have now 8 Wix classic website on Wix, which means that they're actually building more on Editor X. Again, really cool story, and the fact that we actually managed to take them to a bigger level. Another example, right, it is here, it's another agency, that is actually based in Cambridge in the U.K. And again, you can see the company itself is a massive company, right? It's a company that does handling shipping on an enterprise level, a huge company that they build the site for, right? The other thing here is that I like about designers and Editor X is that what we're seeing now is more global. Because designer have so much more time to spend and learn something, to become professional in something. It's actually -- Wix was always a global company. But Editor X is even seems to be for now even more global than Wix, and we can see growth in London, then we can see in another place, right? There's another agency here in South Africa. And then we can see another one, right, in the Philippines, and then we can see more and more and more. And I think that this is kind of like something that I like about it that we can immediately see the growth from Japan, from Vietnam, from so many other countries because the designers are the one who approach Wix, and they are by nature, more versatile in English and learning tools, and then they take it to the local market. So that's amazing.

So you kind of covered and explained how the uniqueness in the competitive landscape for Editor X and also for the Wix Editor, right? When you look at that slide, they were both really giving values that other platforms are not giving. But there's also, I would say, the amplifier, right, kind of the secret weapon, which is Corvid. We introduced Corvid back in October of 2017, and I think the growth graph here is massive. I remember, I'm talking at the beginning, you were saying, "I want to get to 50,000, 100,000. We're north of 2 million now."

Yes. We are.

And I think that, that ability to tie up both the design capability, the complete control of the CSS and the HTML with easy coding capabilities all under that infrastructure that you mentioned, that's really something that's not out there.

Yes. Because every time you go to a big project, right, you find that there's a lot of small things that you need to do. And those things, small things, are usually not something that we would have in the platform coming from within. And then you -- again you have to get servers, you have to coach everybody, you have to maintain server, do all of the cashing and security, load balancing, fail -- and there's like a ton of things that you have to manage. And we thought that we should be able to also streamline that process for you. So if you want to do something, which is a customer code, just do that. And we see that agencies, of course, using that lot more, but not just agencies. We are also seeing start-ups that are been built on Editor X and Corvid.

So for that, actually, I know that the team brought a use case, which I know you really love. And I think this one is a really interesting one.

So this is -- the application is called Barpay, and there's a good chance we probably met it somewhere. It was built by 2 professional baseball players when the pandemic started. They found that they have a lot of free time and then they decided to build the startup.

I thought that baseball players always have a lot of free time.

Yes. And well, we're not going to go here to the discussion if baseball is actually a sport, right?

No. We shouldn't because we know it's not. That's okay.

And they started to build -- they decided to build a way for them to be able to go to bars where you cannot get the menu anymore because you're not allowed to hold them. So they build this application where you're just going and you upload your menu, and it scans it, makes it, and then people can actually order, right, in the bar from their phone and pay from their phone. It took them 2 weeks, right? They're not professional developers. Took them 2 weeks to actually build the first version, start selling that. Today, it's doing very, very well, all built with Corvid, with Wix.

But this is not a website?

No. This isn't a real start-up, right? Well, it has a website. But in fact, you don't think about it as a consumer -- as a website because for the bars, restaurants, hotels, it's something that they look at it as a back-end where they upload the menu, they're able to get money. They don't go there for a website. And a customer goes, they scan a bar code, and it can pay and other things. So for them, it's an application. So in fact, what they built here is not really a website. It's an application.

Because they had the whole full stack of the technology on our platform.

Yes. And of course, it's scalable because of that full stack, and really, they built a complete start-up from 0. And we're seeing a lot of those today. This is the amazing thing. This is not a onetime thing. We're seeing every day, we're seeing those kind of things being built on Wix.

That's tremendous. So the thing that we're definitely seeing now is that with this huge growth on the DIY side, and we know that a lot of people who join us on the DIY side, sometimes don't really want to do it themselves, right? So we have this massive adoption of the DIY and a huge amount of traffic of people coming in. But -- and on the other side, we're getting all of these 270,000 people and growing -- that are building websites for others and they're supplying services, agencies and professional designers. And I think that a big part of the ecosystem that is being built is the marketplace, which is getting a lot more traction now.

Yes. So this is, if you think about it, right, a lot of time, you have a lot of skills to build a website, but not all of them. And take myself, for example, I know the technical part, easy. I know what I want, I can put it there, but I cannot design. I'm a terrible designer. And I would love to. Every time we do it, I actually ask somebody from our studio to come and help me and design it. And this is why we have the Wix marketplace. You can find somebody to build everything for you. You can find somebody to do the marketing for you. You can find somebody just to do the design part for you. You can find somebody to do the search engine optimization for you. You can find somebody to do just the part you need. And basically, what we do is we kind of like aggregating, right? The supply, which we have on Wix, which is huge amount of users arriving every year, right? This year is 30 million, right? And then on the other side, designers that are able to come and solve those issues for those users and designers and agency. And we are getting that. And we're seeing that growing very quickly. And I think this is another key component in how we can be successful going forward. But even more than that, how our customers and the agencies now using Wix can become more successful and grow even faster.

So going back to that slide that you explained before about how everything ties up together, I think that it's very clear how having -- keep on dominating the DIY hemisphere and ecosystem, knowing that everything that we develop no matter whether it's for this crowd or the other crowd goes for all of our users. So they are all benefiting. So we keep on expanding on that, but also expanding all of those professional tools and the infrastructure having Editor X and Corvid really ties up to what you mentioned before, I think.

Yes. I think that you know we are giving more places to find more components, more elements in which you can build. And we're always investing in that infrastructure, I think going forward. And you can see start-ups that have already been built on Wix not website, really start-ups. And I think this vision of having been the operation system, which you build an application for the Internet is something that is becoming more and more true every year.

So 5 years from now, the operation system of everything being built on the Internet.

Well, almost.

Almost.

I'm sure we can leave some for others. But I think the majority could be -- probably the wiser choice for most of the project in Internet to be built on this infrastructure.

Fantastic. Thank you very much, Avishai. I would like to switch over and talk a little bit about e-commerce. For that, I want to invite David Schwartz to join me. David Schwartz, for those of you who have not met him before is our VP Product. He acts as the VP Product and responsible for all of the professional methodologies that has to do with products in the company, and make sure that we meet the same professional levels all across Wix. But he's also the General Manager that is responsible for our commerce products and for our services and booking products and the international expansion of Wix. So he has a very, very busy day and a very full plate. And David, thank you for joining us today.

Hi Nir.

I actually wanted to talk about something else today. I don't want to -- I actually don't want to talk about our Wix Stores, which we mentioned many times in earnings, but I actually want to talk about how we generally widely think about e-commerce. I know you referred to that as e-commerce as a platform. Can you explain to us a little bit about e-commerce platform? What's the potential there?

Sure. So basically, what e-commerce platform means, I'm being asked many times, how can Wix create such high-quality products that gives us so much benefit to our users, Wix Stores and Wix Events and Wix Restaurants and Wix Hotels and Wix Bookings and the solution like Wix Fitness, how can we do all these things with such high-quality and so quickly? So the reason is that it's all being built on building blocks, like Avishai explained before. So you have the cart and the checkout and the scheduling and the tax and the order management and shipping and logistics and customer management. And they're all being functioned together to create amazing products. So that is the way we do things. And that is how we can deliver such high-quality products to our users so quickly.

But how does that -- what does that mean for users? Like give me an example, how does it work?

So the interesting thing about it is that many users in their business need to use more than one product. And I think Benji is a great example for that. So 4 years ago, Benji is arriving to Wix to build core attack fitness. He is a beginner, he starts building his fitness business. He thinks about it very professionally. He looks for a website and a scheduling system. So he starts as a Wix Bookings user. Then the business evolves. Benji sees that the content he creates, he creates videos that are amazing tutorials to do fitness. So he needs to sell them. So as part of fitness solution, he can start selling digital goods through Wix Stores. And then his business continue to grow, he opens a studio. When he opens a studio, he brings on a few other fitness trainers. Now the scheduling becomes more complex, uses advanced features of booking that allow him to manage his team. Okay. And then, unfortunately, to all of us, arrives the pandemia. And that's a huge crisis for Benji and people like him. Because suddenly, the fitness studio is closed. So immediately, he moves to virtual training done by our connectivity to Zoom. And then he also understands that this is the moment to start selling merchandise. Because if you work in virtual training, you need to work at home. So he starts selling equipment, fitness equipment through our drop shipping. And then he understand that this brand is becoming even more stronger through the pandemia. So he uses our print on demand, which is a feature in stores and part of the whole fitness solution to start selling branded sportswear. And it's amazing to see how he grows with us in the last 4 years has been with us. And for me, it's really amazing.

So I'm guessing I know that this is an example, but it's not unique, right? We've seen thousands -- many, many thousands of people like Benji on the fitness side. But does that apply only to fitness?

Of course, not. We've seen numerous of them in all e-commerce platform. Just an example that pops into my head. Again, resulting -- result of the pandemia we've been experiencing. So you have a restaurant and you're using Wix Restaurants and now is great. And suddenly, we all know what happens, the restaurant shuts down. We need to give you the abilities to sustain your business and confront this challenge. So immediately, this restaurant, what they do, they start opening online lessons using the component of Wix Bookings combined with Wix Restaurants, actually enhancing the brand. So once the quarantine is removed, now the business grew up, we don't give up. We do both our old restaurant business, which came alive again and also continue our cooking lessons online, inspiring.

So everything -- you were talking about the huge value that this platform, the e-commerce platform has within Wix in expanding the different reaches of different products and getting more value to our users, helping them expand their business. But going back to Avishai's previous slide about the infrastructure, and the 5-year vision of also going out and allowing external developers to build those kind of extensions and expansions on their own. Are we going to open the e-commerce platform as well to the external world?

We're not going to open it as it is already opened. An agency can go and use the building blocks that are the ones who create e-commerce platform to build a solution of their own. As an example, I've seen an agency that went and built a real estate solution. So they use the catalog to present the real estate and they used bookings to do the scheduling with their customers of the meetings where they're showing this real estate. They even used checkout and Wix Payments actually to get paid and paid plans so of course, and they can reuse it afterwards this agency and position themselves as the providers of the solution for real estate built on top of Wix.

That's really -- I think, that's really huge for their expansion of their business. So I know that you are not willing to step off the stage before you also tell us about your new baby. It's a different babies than Avishai's. It's a technological baby. You want to talk a little bit about the POS?

Wix point-of-sale is very, very exciting for me and for all of us, actually. It's a point of sale. We have a robust point-of-sale that is actually good for your brick-and-mortar store. And it has a mini point-of-sale where you can sell with your mobile phone. And especially for today's challenges, it's a huge thing. Because what happens, basically, you get to Wix point-of-sale and you put inside it your inventory and your catalog and everything, and the interesting thing is that seconds afterwards, you can click a button and this inventory and catalog are going online, simply pick a template, press a button and you have an online store. And this online store and your physical store are functioning seamlessly together with the sync inventory and sync management and sync order and sync CRM and making the life of our users dead easy to go online in these days. For me, it's a super important thing.

So I think it's great to see, and I think this is something that really is the core thing of the Wix product philosophy, is what is the thing that we can do that will bring the best value for our users, help them be more successful and expand their business even further. I think everything you discussed in terms of the platform and obviously also the point-of-sale is definitely like that. I want to thank you very much for bringing this and sharing this with us today.

That's what me and my teams are doing. We're helping our users succeed, confront challenges and grow their business. That's basically the job description.

Great. Thank you very much, David. I will now hand it over to Lior Shemesh, our CFO, to talk more about the financial impact and our excitement towards 2021. As you all know, Lior is a one-man show. So I'm going to be off. I'll be back for the Q&A.

Thank you, Nir, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I'm truly excited mainly about 2 things. The first one is about the opportunity. I mean you've heard everything about the products and about what we intend to do. And I will further dive into the details and what it means for us. And the other thing that I'm really excited about is that finally, after a year or so, I had the opportunity to wear my jacket. So it was really real-time for all of us. But I guess that we are going to see you soon, guys, right? So again, 2020 was a solid growth for us, outstanding growth actually by more than 30%. And I will try to go into the details why it's actually happened and what it means for the future. And then I'm going to talk about 2021 and so on about the future, what we expect as a result of all the investments that we've made. And as a result of all the products that we have right now in our arsenal, right? So we actually managed to build 2 complementary businesses. The first one is the subscription model, where you can actually see also in 2020, and I will talk about it also about the 2021, but it's continued to grow. At the same time, we've created the emerging transaction model. Essentially, this is the business solution. And they are feeding each other. So people are coming. They are using Wix to build their business, to manage their business online. At the same time, they're using all kinds of products like Wix Payments, like delivery, David mentioned the point of sale. So they can actually get the entire services using Wix, and obviously, they are benefiting from that, and it's contributing to our business as well. So again, 2020, amazing year. More than 30% increase growth in term of collection, very similar in terms of revenue. But more importantly, we are building incremental collection. We are creating actually larger cohort that will contribute for the growth for many, many years. Now over here, I want to spend some minutes about the behavior of our cohort. And again, you can see the cohort -- the second quarter cohort and the fact that it was growing more than 60% on a year-over-year basis. And by the way, the third quarter and continue, and as we mentioned in our earnings, is behaving the same way. But I would like to dive even deeper and to try to explain the behavior of the cohort. So basically, there are 3 reasons for the behavior of the cohort. So the obvious one is, obviously, we are bringing more users. We are bringing more premiums, better conversion. But on top of that, it's a result of a different mix both of product, but also the type of the users. So I'm going to spend a few minutes to try to explain what does it mean? What it means is the change of mix of our customers as a result of all the products and everything that you've just heard from Avishai, Nir and David. So the first thing I want to mention is the opportunity that we see of our business verticals, and David explained exactly the offering and what those guys actually are doing, but it's very important to understand I what it means in terms of the behavior of the cohort. So over here in this graph, we can see the growth on a quarter-over-quarter of the business vertical collections versus to the overall growth of weeks. So we actually started it from the Q1 '18 index to the Q1 '18. So it's kind of starting from the same point. But you can clearly see how the business vertical are contributing more than 2x than the overall growth of Wix. Now this is something that is very important because they are 2 things that is very important to mention. The first one is that this has actually started before the pandemic. It actually started when we started to introduce all the business vertical. So what is happening is that we are talking about higher price of subscription. So we are getting more. It's a better retention, higher adoption of our business solution. And obviously, the monetization via the transaction volume, but it's all contribute to the fact that it's growing faster. And I do believe that this kind of mix is going to continue also in 2021 and 2022, it's even going to be more higher than that. So again, this is kind of describe you the overall opportunity that we have with the business vertical, in light of all the new products and all the verticals that we already launched. Now the second reason that involve kind of changing the mix between our users is about the opportunity of users building for others. So Avishai mentioned that, agencies, you saw exactly, you saw the resource, you saw what they're using and why they're using Wix. But think about the opportunity, we have about 270,000 user building for others on Wix to date. But we are talking about a potential of 30 million. I do believe that based on what we are seeing right now is that we are gaining actually more and more those type of users because, obviously, the product is superior. And so I do believe that this is something that is actually provide us with a great opportunity, a great potential for the future. And I would like to show you exactly how we do that. So this graph is actually using the Q1 '19 cohort and showing you the difference or compare between users, building for others to all users. And you can actually see the growth. So there are 2 points over here that's important to mention that they are creating this compounding effect. The first one is that the collection growing faster 2x, 2.5x since the Q1 '18. Meaning that if you will continue to see that throughout the coming years, it's actually going to even expand and be higher because they are building more websites for others. They're using a higher vertical solution, and they have also high retention. So we can clearly see how it actually has a compounding effect on our cohort. And again, I do believe that this is something that is going to be much more significant in the future. On top of that, what explains about the growth, for example, in the third quarter, we managed to increase the number of users creating website for other by more than 3x and this is something that is actually accelerating. I do believe that in the future, as a result of this behavior, I do believe that the portion of top line coming from user building for others is going to be much, much, much more significant. And it's one of the growth engines that we have for the next coming years. So I spoke about the opportunity from the business vertical. I spoke about the opportunity from users that build websites for others. But what about the existing cohorts, how it actually behave in light of all those products and the business solution that they are using. So if you guys remember Q3 '19, we actually show you that we have about $6.1 billion to collect based on the existing cohorts. Now it's $11.8 million. And it's even more amazing. And by the way, this is based on 10 years because we have much more history than 10 years. But even more interesting, we see that it's -- actually, it's not flat, it's increasing. It's increasing because of the adoption of more product from Wix. So this is very interesting, and it provides us with a very solid baseline for the coming years. So the most important thing is about investing into growth, we have the opportunity. We show you before how we actually do that, how we deliver growth through investment in R&D, in support, and we certainly have the opportunity to continue to do that. And we intend to increase and continue with investment in support, infrastructure, obviously, R&D, because essentially, this is how we deliver the growth and marketing to support all of that. Now I would like to explain a few things about the gross margin because, obviously, the model has changed a bit. We have a very healthy gross margin model. And I would like to spend a minute or so to try to explain exactly how it's going to evolve. So in 2020, the gross margin of the creative subscription was 79% to 80%. For the business solution, is 29% to 30%. Now because of the investments, the upfront investments that we are doing and will continue to do on care and infrastructure, the gross margin for creative subscription is going to be 76% to 79%. It really depends also on the growth. But long term, even medium term, is going to go back to the 80% once we start to see the fruits of those investments. Now with regard to the business solution, I do believe that in 2021, we are going to see a different mix because payment is going to be much more significant. And it will take us some time actually to benefit from the scale. So it's going to be 20% to 25%. But long term, as I mentioned many times before, it's going to be 35% to 40%. But obviously, with many, many, many new products and some of them we actually mentioned. With that, I want to talk about next year growth. So I'm super, super excited that we -- based on those investments and the new products that we have, I feel very confident that the growth for next year is going to be 28% to 30%. And this is on top of an amazing year that we had on 2020. So thank you, guys, for joining us today. I will hand it over to Maggie to some Q&A, I guess.

Great. Thank you so much, Lior. [Operator Instructions] The first question is going to come from Ron Josey at JMP Securities.

Great. Avishai congrats on becoming a father. Lior, you good with the jacket on. I wanted to ask 1 on product, just 1 on guidance. I think the point-of-sale is pretty interesting, Avishai and David. Can you talk about -- was this product in development prior to the pandemic? I'm just curious how you were thinking about this longer term. And maybe given the rise of e-commerce, just talk a little bit about what percentage of perhaps your stores have a physical storefront? Or is this something that any insights on how it might be used to get? Because I think just getting a catalog online is definitely interesting. And then Lior, with your longer-term guidance and giving insights on 2021, very helpful. 28% to 30% on collections, I think, is pretty interesting. When I look at your future -- the strength of future collections and the cohort charts that you give on earnings, it looks like a sustainable, call it, 30% rate going forward. Can you just talk a little bit more about 2021, 28% to 30% and the drivers underneath there?

So your first question was about the point of sale. And it's a new product. So we're just launching it and finished testing. And so obviously, it's going to -- we're going to learn more about it as we release it. But when you think about point of sale, right, traditionally, we tend to think about point of sale just for stores. And but this point of sales is actually going to do other things as well. It will also allow you for booking and for fitness and for beauty salons and for doctors and about a lot of things, right? So if you look at the stores, I estimate that about 20% of our stores today have a real store. I might be off here, but this is one of the things that blocks users with restore for using Wix is the fact that we don't have a point of sale and everything integrates, right? So that now might grow up. If you look at the -- more of the fitness, gym, psychologists, beauty, all of those people are using more booking and events, and so obviously, hotels. They have -- 100% of them have a physical location, almost 100% of the physical allocation. And today, a lot of them are using -- they have a computer in order to set up the classes or do the actual thing on the Wix site and then a point of sale to do the transaction. So this is a big opportunity to combine everything together. So I think that this is a product that will really help our customers be more successful and have things more streamlined for them when they use Wix. They're probably going to increase our market share with physical stores.

And to your question, we did actually start working on it prior to the outbreak of the pandemic.

So with regard to the growth that I'm expecting 2021. So obviously, 2020 was a great year for us. And I do believe that we spoke about it also before about the new state of mind, okay? People are going to use and continue to using Wix the way that they used before and in the same magnitude. I do believe that we'll continue with marketing. And perhaps it's going to be a little bit more, a little bit less. But overall, when we think about the new cohorts that we are going to bring on 2021, I think that the fact that we are able to generate a 28% to 30% growth on top of the growth that we already had in 2020, I think that it's truly amazing.

The next question is going to come from Naved Khan from Truist.

Maybe just a question or clarification around the guidance. So the 28% to 30% top line growth for next year, what kind of assumptions are you making in, in terms of the pandemic either continuing to be a tailwind or not or maybe that waning somewhere in the second half of last year -- sorry, next year? And then how should we be thinking about the free cash flow for next year?

Well, we assume that pandemic is going to be over very soon, right? Because vaccines are coming.

I guess so. Look, with regard to the pandemic, we stated before, I think that the level of growth or the number of users and obviously, subscription that we are getting right now, I don't think that it's going to change a lot because it's a new state of mind. And actually, we've seen that in the third quarter. Remember that the growth in the third quarter was about 35%. So I do believe that it will continue. And on top of it, obviously, we have the opportunity of new products. We see a better conversion in some of the cases, better retention so we are going to benefit from all of that in 2021. And most importantly, I did mention the growth of the business vertical and how it's actually impacted the compounded effect, but also about users that are building websites for others. So this is all going to contribute to the growth. In terms of the free cash flow, obviously, there are many, many moving parts, and I will provide the guidance for the free cash flow on February when we are going to report the fourth quarter. I just wanted to provide -- it's not a full guidance. I just wanted to provide the idea about how we can continue with a high growth, also going into 2021. So that was mostly the message, but not about providing what is what will be the operating expenses or the free cash flow for next year.

Understood. And maybe just on the gross margin for the creative solutions. We call out 2 of the factors that are kind of a drag for next year. One is the care investment, the other is infrastructure. If I had to think which one is the bigger of the 2? Can you just maybe give some color on that?

It's certainly the curve. I don't think that we've seen the -- yet the full contribution of the care. I think that Nir can mention how people convert more using the care and we'll talk about it in a minute. But certainly, it's the care. Remember, it's a regular SaaS model. You first, spend and invest the money that you need in order to support a large demand. And obviously, very soon, we are going to see the fruits of it.

Yes. I also think when you think about this year, so the goal about care, one of the key things we saw is that we -- when we actually interact with our users, we can garner a much higher conversion for the users who actually talk to us. In some cases, it goes up almost to 5x the regular conversion rate. So naturally, our goal is not to limit those interactions, but to expand them. The goal this year was to start expanding them by adding more and more entry points and allow more users to find us more easily and do that kind of interaction. But a lot of the investment we put actually had to go into the huge growth of users that we saw as the pandemic hit, which, again, it's a great thing because we were prepared. But it also means that we still have more opportunity to generate growth and benefit from the investment in care as we go into 2021, and we do that expansion that we originally intended to do in 2020.

The next question is going to come from Ygal Arounian from Wedbush Securities.

I just wanted to, Avishai, follow-up on your comments, long term kind of big picture expectation that Wix is going to be the infrastructure that a huge part of the Internet is going to be built on. How you think about that over the long term? How you attack that and how you can get from kind of where you are today and getting -- really being able to capture that opportunity? And then I guess the second question, maybe a little bit similar you talk about the users at build sites for others, that growing 3x or 3x in 3Q and the growth you're seeing there. I'm assuming a lot of that is coming from the partner program. You didn't touch on that specifically. So maybe if you could talk about how that fits in with the partner program and some of the progress you're seeing there?

Of course. So I'll start the first part. So this is kind of like a longer-term vision, but you can see a lot of it happening today, right? Even today, you can see that we just saw a huge logistic company. We just saw really top end brands websites being built on Wix. And this shows something, right, that -- and then a start-up, right? So we can see that what you used to be like 5 years ago, mostly small businesses and tiny businesses, is now doing so much more. And this shift is happening because of stability of the infrastructure, right, and the ability to create more things on Wix. So there are less limits, and there are a lot more benefits. And every month, it's hard actually to have a website on the Internet which don't use something like Wix. And the amount of hacking and downtime you see are just one example why it's harder. The more we enhance, right, our infrastructure, the more we enhance Editor X, the more we enhance Corvid, right, Wix Code, the value that you bring becomes so strong that you can always do it yourself. But at some point, that just doesn't make sense to do it, right? And if Saint Laurent or that -- the [ Piranha ], the agency, building the same website, right, without Wix in the same cohort, in the same performance, security, ability to manage permissions would have crossed probably hundreds of thousands of dollars. And now they can just do it in one place. And now that all the time, you're going to get more, right? You're always been upgraded and getting more and more functionality. And I think that as we move forward, that gap will continue to grow. And we have been -- always been a company that was very good at innovating and adding functionality and making things better. And I think that we are just getting better than that. If you look at the rate of development and Wix is actually accelerating, not decelerating, which is usually what happened for a lot of software companies. So I'm very optimistic that in 5 years, you have -- to really have a very unique project or [indiscernible] correctly in order to build something not on the Wix platform. I think that's where we're aiming for, that's a vision. I believe that the opportunity is huge and we are working very hard to get there. So that was for the first part. The second part about -- so the partners program is doing very well, right? Obviously, we work very closely with partners. And it has a couple of layers. So the first layer is actually managed partners. So we actually work with them, we talk to them, we help them. They have an account manager and somebody is always there with them, right? And this is more of the classic kind of partners program that you usually meet with a lot of the standard software models. But then we also have a community for agencies and designers. And that's doing very, very well. So it can be really one of the partner program. You can use the second layer, which is more of a community. And a lot of the designers actually prefer, okay, only to approach us when they need something, but most of the time, just consume content and contribute content to the community. And the combination of those is growing, as you saw, extremely fast and create also very strong brand loyalty and product understanding. So we can see that partners tend to use a lot more of what Wix can do and actually be more ambitious in terms of what to achieve and doing Wix.

And maybe if I could just ask 1 quick follow-up on the partners program. And when your sales team is kind of going out and making the pitch for Wix, what are the areas that you think give you the biggest inroads, right? These agencies are often using Shopify or Magento, BigCommerce, right? You got a lot of -- with your e-commerce product and Editor X, you've got a lot of new features that you're trying to kind of push to this professional market. What are the areas that you got the best feedback from the partners that maybe feel like gave you the best access to this market? And what are the areas that you've got some pushback on that partners are looking for a little bit more in terms of product?

So first of all, you mentioned e commerce, just classic e-commerce, right? And when we go to agencies, one of the biggest things that we bring is that we can do a lot more. If you're a big agency, probably 5% of your projects are e-commerce projects. 95% of them are not. So you can either use Shopify for that. You cannot use Magento for that, right, because they just don't do none-commerce. They all do e-commerce. So we go after the 95%. And then we also have really good functionality for the e-commerce. And in some cases, we have seen that we replace Magento, in some places we replace Shopify. But again, I don't think that our competition aren't necessarily those websites, right, the 5%. We're trying to go after also the 95% that nobody else is there, except maybe Wordpress.org. So this is the pitch we're coming with. The design capabilities in Wix, right, are by far greater than any of our competitors, the ability for them to build what they want and for agencies and partners, it's very important to be able to do that. So they spend a lot of energy on that. This is what they sell to their customers. We're going to make you a beautiful website, going to convert really well, right, so we're able to provide that pitch. Things that we I think we should improve on is one of them, for example, our ability for our customer to easily delegate work to their customer, right? They want to block page and say, okay, you can all touch those to their customer because when their customer does actually can break it, they have to fix it, right, they don't like that. The ability to charge money from their customers. They're looking at and say, "Hey, we have to spend a lot of energy that can solve these for us. So most of it will be in that level of how they can work with their customers. That's about what they can do with Wix. Of course, there's always more requirements coming as to what you can do with Wix. But this is less the bigger part of the conversation.

The next question is going to come from Sterling Auty from JPMorgan.

So Avishai, in your prepared remarks, when you went through the competitive landscape, from your standpoint, just out of curiosity, why don't you include GoDaddy as one of the competitors?

Well, agencies?

No, no, no. Back when you had Squarespace...

Yes. But I will say about Editor X. GoDaddy as far as I know, have nothing that actually address similar crowds. Unless they require, I didn't see. I mean they don't -- they have a very simple basic site builder. And they have WordPress.org, which they hold kind of like for you, but they have nothing that does the design similar to Editor X. It's like literally no product that I know. You can use GoDaddy, if you do the design with some other tool and then import it and put it on WordPress.org hosted by GoDaddy. But that's pretty much it. So I'd say that in that place, they are not existing.

Got you. And then one follow-up. In terms of the 30 million addressable market that you're penetrating the 27 -- where you're starting at 270,000, how would you characterize what portion of that is inside of agencies? What portion is inside businesses versus maybe even individuals, just to try to break down that 30 million?

Well, it's very hard. I can give you my estimation. It's very hard to find really valid market research on that. But I would assume that probably about 2 million to million are inside organization, right? So you have Chase, right? So Chase probably have a big department that does the website, right? And -- but as you've seen here, a lot of the other companies that we mentioned today don't, right, go to agencies. So it's -- I'd say that I would assume that probably about 2 million to 3 million are working inside enterprises and companies, then probably about 10 million will be real agencies, right, of various sizes. And the rest will probably be private people that are just building stuff on their own.

All right. We have one question from an investor that sent me an e-mail. So I'm just going to read their question. It's as more growth is generated from vertical solutions, how do you see your positioning versus specialists in areas like e-commerce, restaurants or fitness?

Sorry, can you repeat the question? Maybe can you read it again?

Sure. As more growth is generated from vertical solutions, how do you see your positioning versus e-commerce specialists?

Well, I think that it's -- when we -- I mean -- so if you look at the restaurant, right, a lot of what you need to do is similar to what you do to an e-commerce store, but not everything, right? But if you think about the website, right, you need to serve the website, you need to [indiscernible], you need to be able to design it. You need to have media that is automatically proportionalized to fit the screens. You need to have security, you need to have permissions. You need to have a huge amount of things, right? And then there is a small layer, which does the shopping cart or does the restaurant or does other things. And I think that one of the beautiful things that we have in Wix is that because we are all of that, we're able to do each one of them very well. If you look at -- the one that you spoke about, obviously, with e-commerce, we have a lot more competition, right? And our vision is to empower businesses to control their e-commerce and then to be able to create a beautiful design around it. It's just about competing with ad boards on it as a company. But I think we're doing really good on, of course, the combination of all of the e-commerce elements, and I think they're all contributing with each other because if you have a place that you know we have one agency and they build a restaurant website today, an event website tomorrow, and then an e-commerce store today, it's very likely we're going to use the same tool, not necessarily, but I think it's all contributing to each other and making everything better and better. Another part of it is that if you look at most of the hair salons, right, they do have all the appointments and they want to sell that, and it's really important then to manage a calendar and charge for it, but they also have a store. You want all those things to talk and work with each other. So I think as a combined offering, it's really very strong and offers something very unique to our customers.

Great. So our next question is going to come from Ken Wong from Guggenheim.

I wanted to maybe touch a little bit on long term. We talked a lot about products. You've got a lot of interesting things in the queue for creative and for business solutions. But right now, business solution is about 18% of collections. In your longer state model, where do you see that collections mix? Is it more evenly distributed? Is it more business solutions? Would love your sense there. And then my follow-up, just on POS, I'd love to get a sense for when you guys plan to go to market, what is the go-to-market strategy there? And is that where you have to build out a sales force? Or can you guys kind of operate under your current kind of your current environment?

Well, with regard to the first question, it's hard for me to provide you like the prediction how much it's going to be out of the revenue because it also really depends on how much the subscription is going to grow. But I think that what is important that they are growing in parallel, right? We spoke about the change of mix and how complementary it is to the subscription model that we have. I do believe that the portion of business solution, for example, next year is going to be higher than this year. And I think that it will continue like that. Is it going to be 50%, 60% or 40%? I think that it's too soon to understand. Remember that we're also launching new products, like, for example, like the POS, Facebook ads that we've launched. And so it has can have like really significant effect delivery, significant effect on the business solution. I think that at this stage, it's hard to determine how much it's going to be out of the overall top line.

In terms of the POS question. So as David mentioned, we're kind of -- we've been piloting with some small group, and we're going to extend that and start soft launching it. It's still a bit too early to determine exactly when it's going to be like a full-blown vast launch, but it's definitely going to happen some time in 2021. At least, I think at the first stage, we don't really need the sales force because we have so much opportunity, Avishai mentioned that before, when he explained the potential of who can use the different kinds of point of sale that we're going to offer. We have so many users that already are on the platform that may benefit from it that I don't see us having to build a big hefty sales force in order to go after that. We are going to and already are in the process of understanding the care and support methodologies that you want to pursue in order to do this right, but it's not going to be completely different to what we've -- we're already doing today.

Next question is going to come from Brent Thill from Jefferies.

Congrats on the new family members and new products. Lior, you mentioned the reinforcing business model between transactions and subscriptions. And I'm curious if you could give us a sense next year on the transactional side, how influential is that to the revenue. And over time, when you look at the percentage of your revenue mix and from transactions from subscriptions, is there a goal that you'd like to see transactions as a percent of the mix or not? Are you just treating it as part of the overall business model?

So I'm going to start from -- actually from the second question because I think that it's important to understand the strategy that we have. We don't have like a target of gross margin of business solution, and not either the portion out of revenue. I think that what is important is about the growth of it and that it's all incremental dollar to the free cash flow, meaning that the way that I'm actually analyzing it I'm looking at the free cash flow out of the creative subscription. Gross margin over there is really important. I mentioned that it's going to be 80%. But there are so many complementary products that we can offer and already started to do that. And some of it is very low gross margin. But think about it, if you are able to bring $1 billion of top line, with only 20% of profits, wouldn't you take it? So it's not about a target of how much it's going to be out of the total revenue. Honestly, I don't know at this point of time. I do know that 2021, and this is going back to your question, is going to be higher than 2020. And I'm going -- we are going to provide the guidance on February, but it's going to be higher, mainly from -- I think, 2 reasons. The first one, I think the payments and you saw that by -- the gross margin that I indicated, payments are going to be much higher than 2020. I think that it's a great indication to the fact that also our customers are growing. And the second thing is about new offering, new products that we have just started.

The next question is going to come from Nick Jones at Citi.

I guess just I want to touch on Editor X a little bit. You comment on the 270,000 people building sites for other people. What are you hearing in terms of Editor X versus maybe the huge amount of themes and something like WordPress? How big of a pain point is design being able to customize it versus going through a large library of solutions that maybe have something that doesn't really require active design work. Any color there would be great.

Yes. So I think that from what we notice is that if you go to the agencies, they always do design. They never take something out of the box and just deploy it, right? They always go for the process of taking something and then customizing a lot. And that's a huge pain. Mostly, the process would be to use something like Adobe XD or Figma and then send that to a developer, then the developer try to code it. Then there is a cycle that goes like that. And then at some point, they can deploy it. And that will be on WordPress or some other platform. And what we've seen is that by removing this cycle and this interaction and doing everything twice, we've created a huge benefit for them. So the reaction that we get most of the time, while we feel that Editor X is replacing WordPress, right? They were using that in the same way, the WordPress platform. And we are seeing a lot of agencies that are moving well, beginning a bit more suspiciously, right? They're moving to free projects, and then they just very quickly are doing the majority of their projects. And so we're seeing that, again, the there's another thing here, right? Because when you build a WordPress, you are never finished, right? You have a WordPress site. You put it. Let's say, you put it on, GoDaddy as Sterling mentioned, right? So you build it with Figma or with one of Adobe XD, you have a developer that built it, then you took it and you host in a hosting company. And now what happened when one of the plug-ins that you have as a security upgrade, right? And usually, you use like 12 of those. So every month, you have to do like 15 to 20x, go in, upgrade it very quickly because if not, someone is going to hack into that website. Then you have to actively make sure that you delete all the garbage files that have being created. Then you have to make sure that -- so there's always a lot of maintenance that goes into that after which the agency has to spend a lot of effort to. And they are responsible for the customer, right? They are responsible for the data, for the credit card, for the privacy. It's a lot of things to be responsible for. With Editor X, you don't have to think about any of those. It just happens. So this is the big -- one of the -- we have the flexibility of design, they don't need to do this cycle, and then maintenance is super easy. Those are the big benefits that we bring.

I'm going to read another investor question here. When the pandemic hit in Q1, I'm sure you developed some initial points of view regarding how changes in user behavior would affect this business. How have those points of view changed since Q1? And in other words, what has been most surprising to you over the past 6 months about the behavior of customers?

I think that -- well, all of it surprised us, right? I was definitely not prepared to the pandemic. So I was surprised about all of it. I think it was -- the one thing we could have predicted from beginning is that e-commerce will grow bigger, right? The traditional standard e-commerce will just grow because people need to order products, right? They need to order food. They need to order things. So restaurants and the e-commerce was kind of like the obvious thing. But then things like online events started to grow. Education becoming something that is really virtual, fitness classes, psychologists, psychiatrists, all of those guys decided to work online, over Zoom using Wix to actually manage all of their operation, some of them throwing events, right, big events on Wix Events. And the recovery on that was amazing because it kind of went like this, right? And that just went up. And now it's back to where it was, but most of it is online. For me, it's amazing because I don't know how many online events you guys thought you're going to be participating in, which are not investor-related stuff, right, during your life. The list for me was very small, right, before the pandemic. You tell me how many shows of music you're going to go to see, well, now what? And apparently, during the pandemic, we've seen that it's really, really common, right? And now it will become very common. So for me, the innovation that people had and how to redo what they do in an online universe was just amazing and really surprising to see the power of that. And amazing to see that events is at the same place, participation in classes is at the same place. And really, people that work with consultant from fitness to psychologists to business consultant, they all were just migrated online. For me, that's amazing.

Great. Okay. Our next question is going to come from Josh Beck from KeyBanc.

Nice to take a step back and think through all the milestones you've crossed this year personally and professionally. But yes, so I wanted to maybe just unpack a little bit about how you're thinking about next year because I think a top investor question is we've seen this huge surge in digital acceleration. You've benefited from that. But you're really expecting that to continue into 2021. So I'm just curious of these initiatives that you've spoken of, certainly what's happening with Editor X, what's happening with e-commerce, what's happening with payments, how much of that is a factor into the guidance and the sustained strong growth as we think about next year?

Sure. So obviously, when we do the model, we take into consideration all kinds of options. Obviously, we said that after a few months now since this pandemic actually started, and we see it right now. We saw that in Q3. The way that we're actually looking at it, especially around Q3 because I think that Q2, you can say, okay, it was different. It all started. It was booming, but what about Q3? Many countries almost got to where they were before. I mean people were going out and so on and stores were open, but it still continues. Because the state of mind has changed. I think that -- and also the consumer behavior. I mean we are ordering more online. I don't believe that people will just stop ordering online. I think that they actually understand that it can save time for them, right? So to answer your question, I do believe that 2021 will continue, perhaps not at the same magnitude, but it will be very similar to what we are seeing in Q3. I don't think that it's -- and actually, starting Q1, boom, it will go down to where it were before. I think that we're already behind it.

Okay. Really helpful. And then just 1 other question on the cadence of gross margins. So payments strikes me as something that could rise through the year, and as it rises, I think you'd potentially see a commensurate pressure on the business solutions gross margin. So is that the right way to think about maybe how to build that in through the year? And then on the creative business, should we be thinking about gross margins, maybe taking a step down because of some of the investments upfront and then maybe normalizing as we go through the year? Any color just as we build in these.

I think that you described it perfectly well. I think that on the creative subscription, due to the investments that we do right now. So obviously, it has a little bit of pressure on the gross margin. Really, really fast, it's going to be back because the increase in support that we need to do to train the people, we need to bring them on board. And it's also really hard right now due to the pandemic. But once they are in and start to contribute, you're going to see the gross margin going back to where it were before. The same is go for infrastructure, about security, about hosting and so on. With regard to the payments, so yes, payment is going to be a bigger portion on 2021 out of the business solution. And this is why it has a impact on the gross margin, but we need to understand payments has kind of a cap limit in terms of the gross margin, right? Because I mentioned that many times before, about 2/3 go to the credit card companies and 1/3 go to us. But it's very important that actually, you increase the gross margin based on scale, okay? So we are going to add more payment solution to our payment infrastructure in 2021 so we are going to be -- it's going to have a pressure at least at the very beginning until it's scaled up. But once we are there, it's the mathematics basically will win. So I do believe why I have confidence why in the long term, I mean, it depends how you describe long term. But once the scale is up, we are going to be back to about 35%, even perhaps 40% of the gross margin from the business solution, unless we are going to see a new product, but it's all good news.

Our next question comes from Mark Mahaney from RBC.

Before Mark asks the question, I have a question for Mark. I remember the key promise that next time we're on the call, he's going to play us a guitar song. I remember that. That was not guitar, but okay.

Lior Avishai and Nir, so 2 questions. One, you haven't talked so much about sales and marketing. So you really leaned in the sales and marketing this year. And I think that's what's behind your top line collections outlook for next year. How do you think about your sales and marketing intensity in '21? And then secondly, I think Wix is becoming more and more crucial to a lot of individuals, enterprises, businesses, et cetera. COVID really kind of underscored, highlight just how important digital presence and all its capabilities are. How does that make you think about pricing power any differently going into '21 than you thought about it going into pre-COVID?

So with regard to the sales and marketing, you're definitely not going to see the same growth in percentage that we had in 2020. But I think that the level of investments in marketing I think in dollars is actually going to continue just because of what I mentioned before about the new state of mind and our ability to generate the growth. Remember, we also have like many new products, which is all good stuff. And obviously, we need to invest more in marketing in order to make sure that we are -- can monetize on those products. Based on what I just said, I think that you should expect to see some leverage of the sales and marketing in 2021 compared to 2020.

I think the other part of your question, Mark, about the pricing. Again, I think clearly, 2020 was a year not -- while people are under duress, and that wasn't the time to consider pricing changes. But this is definitely something that we'll keep on considering and testing in the future. We do believe that a part of going and working with bigger brands, bigger clients, also opens up some opportunity to think about what kind of offering these people might have. It's a little bit too early for us to share anything about that. But you can rest assured, this is something we're thinking about.

I think that it's obvious. So some of the customers, it's obvious that we are leaving money on the table that a lot of them would have paid a lot more for the website. And we need to be able to create the packaging for that, and this is something that we're thinking about and how to make the enterprise offering fit in what we're doing.

All right. Unfortunately, I think that's all that we have time for today. Nir, Avishai and Lior, any last words before we part ways?

All right. It was a crazy year and exciting, and crazy. And there's a Chinese saying, right? May you live in boring time or something like that, but interesting time. And so hopefully, next year will be a less more boring for all of us, less pandemic, more safe, and still great for business.

And we're going to try and meet you face-to-face. We prefer the human touch rather than the remote Zoom-like approach.

Yes, absolutely, we'll be very happy to have a chance to meet everybody in person next year. Many thanks for the trust and for being with us for so long. Thank you, guys.

Thank you.

Great. Thanks, everybody. We'll be posting a replay of this and the slides on our IR website shortly. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day.