By Sam Boughedda
BTIG analysts raised the firm's price target on Etsy (NASDAQ:ETSY) to $137 from $119 and maintained a Buy rating on the stock in a note on Thursday.
The analysts said a post-Black Friday survey suggests shoppers are more active on Etsy than even they expected to be, while there are "overall positive trends."
"Over the past few days we conducted a snap survey of over 200 active Etsy shoppers to get a feel for how Etsy performed through Black Friday Weekend (BFW) as well as to gauge shopper intentions for the balance of the Holidays. An interesting aspect of our survey is we surveyed these same Etsy buyers in early October, so we can compare how our shoppers' actual behavior compares to their prior intentions. The upshot is shoppers are signaling they will buy more on etsy.com than they indicated in Oct," wrote the analysts.
The analysts also said that the survey group expects to spend 18% more than they did in Holiday 2021, another encouraging sign, although there is no guarantee they will spend that much.
"We are by no means suggesting Etsy's company-wide GMV will come in at +18% y/y. Indeed, ETSY guided the core marketplace to decline HSD in 4Q22. Having said that, we are nudging up our 4Q22 GMV estimate by about 1% but remain in the range of a HSD decline for core Etsy. When we triangulate our findings with generally better-than-expected overall online spending over BFW, we believe ETSY is tracking well relative to GMV guidance of $3.6-$4.0B," the analysts concluded.