The AI threat to Wix: Should you buy the dip?

Four days ago, The Motley Fool published a piece about stocks that took a hit due to the disruption caused by AI in their respective industries, which included Wix, the Israeli website builder. As a former employee of Wix, I was surprised to see it being categorized with other companies that are truly in danger. Let’s talk about it…

AI built a Wix website on Midjourney

The article started with Chegg, a homework support platform, and then extended to Fivrr, Upwork, and Wix. To be fair, students have already started leaving Chegg and people are opting for ChatGPT to write content instead of hiring gig workers at Fivrr and Upwork. However, has Wix been impacted at all? No, not according to the most recent information they have shared.

I used the AI tool MidJourney to make this image, I gave it the prompt to “Build a Wix website” and this is what it came up with- cool to look at, but useless and not a threat.

As of this morning, Wix is trading for $76.79. But just yesterday on May 4th, Raymond James upgraded their outlook for Wix.com (NASDAQ:WIX) from Market Perform to Outperform with a one-year price target of 109.26. Zacks give a whole list of reasons why you should buy Wix including revenues predicted to grow from 9-11%.

14 Wall Street analysts are setting an average 12 month price target at $108.54 with a high forecast of $125.00 and a low forecast of $87.00. The average price target represents a 41.24% change from the most recent price.

Here is why the experts are bullish: Wix started as an easy way to build beautiful websites, but that’s the old Wix. The current Wix is an all-in-one business suite that supports e-commerce and a wide range of business online and in real world like point-of-sale and restaurant reservations. Wix customers are ridiculously loyal and churn is low.

Motley Fool cited a tweet from 10Web, a company that allows users to create websites using AI in minutes. While it’s a handy service, the hosting costs are comparable and it offers far less functionality than Wix. Why would anyone pay the same amount per month for much less? They won’t. I spent 15 minutes clicking around 10Web’s website and couldn’t even figure out how it works, it’s not user friendly at all.

Wix has always been ahead of the curve, incorporating AI to build websites since 2016. In February, they integrated ChatGPT. I’m sure they’ll have their advanced website builder soon, which will be far better than Web 10.

Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami put up a post on Linkedin with his thoughts on AI and a few of the ways Wix will be using it including an upgrade to ADI, application of large language models (LLM) and the ability to use AI to edit and enhance your own images. All of this is being trained on million of live websites.

Wix’s stock has a strong buy recommendation from experts and that hasn’t changed, even though the stock took a nose dive. Makes you wonder, either someone out there has access to information that no one else has, or maybe you should buy the dip…

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Full disclosure: I am a former employee. I was not contacted by the company or asked to write this post. This is my opinion from my perspective with some insight from having worked there.