E-commerce has been one of the significant investing themes of the last decade. But many top e-commerce stocks are down significantly during a difficult market environment in 2022, giving investors another chance to add some top e-commerce names to their portfolio at prices they may not have thought they'd see again.
While e-commerce retail sales have grown into a $1 trillion market annually in the United States, believe it or not, e-commerce still only accounts for 13% of retail sales. This means that while e-commerce is a lucrative market, there is plenty of room for growth. Let's take a look at three top e-commerce stocks that look like attractive opportunities right now.
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1. Wix.com
Wix.com (WIX 0.11%) is a web development platform that enables users to create websites and provides customers with over 1,000 tools to optimize them. While it never seemed to reach quite the level of notoriety as competitor Shopify, Wix is another e-commerce stock that has given investors great returns over the last few years. At one point, Wix was a 10-bagger over a five-year time frame. Unfortunately, Wix has fallen on hard times since then, and has fallen 63% from its 52-week high as 2022's bear market has hit growth stocks that aren't turning a profit, like Wix, particularly hard. Wix gets 42% of its revenue from outside of North America, so the strong dollar hasn't helped matters.
But there's plenty of reason to believe better times are around the corner for Wix. Starboard Value, a prominent activist investor, recently took a large stake in Wix and says that it believes shares are "undervalued" and that they represent an "attractive investment opportunity." After Starboard's involvement, an Oppenheimer analyst upgraded Wix to a buy rating with a $110 price target, which represents a nearly 40% upside from Wix's current price.
Wix's management team aims to grow to $2.5 billion in revenue and $500 million in free cash flow by 2025. The company has negative free cash flow today and brought in revenue of $1.27 billion in 2021. If the company can turn free cash flow positive while essentially doubling revenue, the stock should have considerable upside ahead, even if its price-to-sales multiple of 3.7 remains constant. For these reasons, Wix looks like a compelling opportunity for risk-tolerant investors.
2. Semrush
You may not immediately think of Semrush (SEMR 3.48%) as an e-commerce stock, but its platform is crucial to any company or individual trying to build a successful e-commerce business. Semrush's tools help users improve their search engine optimization (SEO), analyze web traffic data, and monitor competing sites. These are critical needs for any e-commerce enterprise because potential customers need to be able to find a company's website in a crowded field.
Semrush has already been used by over 11 million marketing professionals, and these aren't just start-ups -- it counts Telsa, Procter & Gamble, and Walmart as customers, and 30% of Fortune 500 companies use its services. Semrush even helps Amazon sellers enhance their effectiveness with its Sell zone product, which helps specifically with Amazon SEO and enables sellers to research and analyze in-demand products.
Semrush's offerings look like they are resonating with customers, as it grew revenue by 39% year over year in the most recent quarter, and annual recurring revenue grew by 35% year over year for the first half of 2022. Even better, Semrush boasts 125% dollar-based net revenue retention, indicating that Semrush's customers find its tools to be valuable and that they are spending more money with Semrush over time. Despite this strong performance, shares of Semrush are down 56% from their all-time high. After this decline, Semrush looks like an attractive buy based on its strong revenue growth and net dollar retention rate.
3. MercadoLibre
Finally, in a list of high-growth e-commerce stocks that you can buy now and hold for the long term, you can't leave out MercadoLibre (MELI 0.87%). MercadoLibre is Latin America's leading e-commerce player, and it also features attractive complementary businesses like Mercado Pago (payments) and Mercado Credito (credit).
While shares are down 48% from their 52-week high, MercadoLibre's business is stronger than ever -- during the most recent quarter, MercadoLibre grew revenue by 57% year over year. At the same time, fintech revenue, which includes Mercado Pago and Mercado Credito, grew at an even more impressive clip, surging 118% from $561 million to $1.19 billion.
Sea Limited, which invested heavily in establishing an e-commerce presence in South America, is scaling back its operations, leaving less competition for MercadoLibre. MercadoLibre looks attractive as Latin America's dominant e-commerce powerhouse and as an all-encompassing ecosystem for payments, credit, and e-commerce. At a price-to-sales multiple of 5.3, MercadoLibre is trading at a much cheaper valuation than it has historically enjoyed, making the present time an attractive entry point.
Ultimately, stocks in the e-commerce sector have slogged through a challenging 2022, but the long-term outlook for e-commerce is as promising as ever. These businesses are growing and are in the best shape that they have ever been in, though the market is not giving them credit for this yet. This creates an attractive buying opportunity to add these three top e-commerce stocks to your portfolio and to hold them for the long term.
