How Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Changed Wix.com?

The COVID-19 pandemic affected different businesses in different ways. In this video clip, recorded on March 16, Motley Fool senior analyst Bill Mann asks Nir Zohar, chief operating officer and president of website building company Wix.com (WIX -0.30%) how it has changed the company's business, and what it means for investors.

Bill Mann: What I'd like to focus on is how the market has changed over the last year for Wix. 

Nir Zohar: Absolutely. I think there is no more elevator pitch for Wix because we've become such a much more complex story than we used to be. Going back in history, originally, we supplied a platform for people to build websites, for people to do it on their own. Be able, without no technical knowledge, to go online and build your own website and put a big emphasis on how professional the result would look like. It wasn't only about building a website, but also make sure that it is well designed, it looks really good because, beautiful on the website, pretty much equals professional. That reflects not only on the website itself, but whenever it contains, which is usually your business or your personal or hobby or portfolio or anything else that we want it to look professional.

But when you look at our vision, our vision was always that we want to create something different on the internet. We want to take this massive building block of the internet, which is how do you publish, how you put something online, and restructure it in a way that anyone can do it easily. But also make sure that when we speak about anyone, it sounds as if you're only facing or trying to attract people who are having a hard time, we actually eventually wanted to go along the line of doing this really for anyone.

If you lack the technical skills and you want to do something very simple, actually, answer a few questions and get a site generated for you, we'll have a solution for you. We call it ADI, it's our Artificial Design Intelligence website generator. It does a beautiful website for you. If you're more proficient, more of a power user, we have the Wix Editor. You can go in. It's a canvas that you can play around. We can give you some design suggestions to start from or you can start from scratch. It's a little bit like a PowerPoint, that is just running online and then enables you to go all the way to a fully functional website. But also we wanted to attract professional crowds.

We introduced about a year ago, Editor X, which is a true design platform for professional designers and agencies. We coupled both ADI Editor with Velo, which is a coding environment. So you can write custom codes and not only be limited by what our platform offers you. We took all the lengths of the chain in terms of the different levels of professional agencies, different levels of needs of what you want to put online, and we introduced that to our users and customers. The other thing that we've done over the years is, when we launched Wix in 2007-2008, a website was a very simple thing. It was a webpage, maybe a few pages under it, and if you were sophisticated enough, you embedded something like a YouTube video or something like that. That was pretty much it. It had text, it had images, and maybe an embedded video.

Today, a website, we're going to talk about what happened in the last year in that aspect, but today, a website is a much more complex thing. Because people want to use a website as the gateway into their business. They want to be able, not only to showcase the business, they want to be able to transact. Transaction can be selling things, which makes a lot of sense, but it can also booking an appointment, or scheduling a class, or actually interaction with the customer who is online and chatting with them, or maybe adding a video.

They want the back end of the website to manage their business, have the list of the customers, both on the website and when's their birthday, and send them a coupon. It's a whole different level of complexity, which again if you're a big business, if you're Nike, you're going to spend a few millions of dollars, you're going to build it with very sophisticated tools, you can afford it. But if you're a small business owner, obviously you can't afford it in terms of time and money. The idea is that we vetted all of that functionality in a simple way so a small business can do it, and it's already pre-integrated.

So there's no installation, or integration, nothing. Just plug it in the same box, and it's working. That's basically the story of Wix, and the evolution of what we are, and where we are now. I think what happened in the last year is that that need that I just spoke about, started accelerating and amplifying itself in a massive way. Because for many businesses whose digital presence was something that was either a nice-to-have, or good to have or an extension, it suddenly became in many cases, either the main funnel of running your business, or even the only funnel of running your business, because you are under lockdown. We were very well geared for this, because we've been developing and innovating for years now, to be in a position where we can absorb all of this traffic and all of the different new needs that our customers are asking for.

But the way I think about it or to see this, this is not a one-time thing. It's not the peak of necessity that's going to go down, it's a trend of businesses moving to a much deeper online presence. Because in essence, if you think about what we're building, it's a SaaS solution, which is essentially an operating system for the business, because you can run all of your business in one place. I think the reason we were working on this, is because we recognize that the world is going there, and it's just accelerated. It's not going to go back. I think it's also interesting to mention that, it's not only the business owner behavior that has changed, it's also the consumer behavior that has changed. 

Mann: Right.

Zohar: People are now much more accustomed to buying, and transacting, and scheduling, and doing everything online, because we forced them to do it. Well, not we, but the world forced them to do it.