SPS Commerce Aktie

Good day, and welcome to the SPS Commerce's Third Quarter 2026 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Irmina Blaszycyk, Investor Relations for SPS Commerce. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us on SPS Commerce's Third Quarter 2026 Conference Call. We will make certain statements today, including with respect to our expected financial results, go-to-market strategy and efforts designed to increase our traction and penetration with retailers and other customers. These statements are forward-looking and involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially.

Please note that these forward-looking statements reflect our opinions only as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Please refer to our SEC filings, specifically our Form 10-K, as well as our financial results press release for a more detailed description of the risk factors that may affect our results. These documents are available at our website, spscommerce.com, and at the SEC's website, sec.gov.

In addition, we are providing a historical data sheet for easy reference on the Investor Relations section of our website, spscommerce.com. During our call today, we will discuss adjusted EBITDA financial measures and non-GAAP income per share. In our press release and our filings with the SEC, each of which is posted on our website, you will find additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations of these measures with comparable GAAP measures.

And with that, I will turn the call over to Chad.

Thanks, Irmina, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Supply chain management has reached a critical inflection point across the retail ecosystem. Brands and retailers are adopting AI to transition from reactive operations to proactive execution, expecting clear and quantifiable return on their investment. While AI unlocks powerful operational efficiencies, its true potential is realized when combined with contextual supply chain data.

At SPS Commerce, new genic AI capabilities are combined with the intelligence of a network built on more than 300,000 trading relationships, nearly 3 decades of proprietary knowledge and retailer compliance rules that aren't documented anywhere else. For SBS customers are Agentic AI called MAX, plays a central role in driving supply chain efficiencies and by embedding the SPS network intelligence directly into trading partner workflows and automation systems. As a result, MAX delivers real ROI today and because it runs on network intelligence, that compounds with every new trading connection. It's continually learning to deliver ROI in the future.

Building on this foundation, last month, we announced new and expanded capabilities across our product portfolio. These advancements help brands and retailers operate faster, and more proactively with greater visibility across their supply chains to achieve immediate and measurable results. MAX, our embedded Agentic AI supply chain offering is now available to all of our fulfillment customers, grounded in real-world trading behaviors. MAX guides users through daily supply chain workflows and identifies operational anomalies and prevent costly errors before they occur. Decision Intelligence and expansion of SPS analytics connect sell-through, inventory and supply chain signals into a unified view organized around retailers' key weekly inventory and forecasting decisions.

Visibility management connects ERP, warehouse management, transportation management and carrier systems into a single real-time purchase order status view. It services potential disruptions before they impact an order or revenue automatically engaging suppliers to resolve them. While these product innovations represent the next step in our vision for the intelligent supply chain network, the true test is the tangible ROI delivered to our customers. RIPET Sports a high-growth brand, selling sporting equipment to major retailers like Dick's Sporting Goods, Walmart and Amazon, is leaning heavily into AI to expedite efficiency and the insight. In its first week live, Max saved this customer $200,000 by flagging chargebacks and late receivables that the RIPET team couldn't see and identified a process error to eliminate future loss. MAX watches every trading partner and explains resolutions in plain language leveraging retailer-specific compliance patterns that aren't documented elsewhere.

MAX recently detected more than 200 shipment status failures between Zevia, a beverage brand and their 3PL. In those orders, neither Zevia nor the ERP were being updated automatically with the correct workflow status. For a customer of this size, we estimate up to $3 million in receivables could have been delayed had those shipments not been realized and invoiced on time. Something inked a creative merchandising and custom branding company that works with major sports and entertainment brands uses MAX to accelerate invoice searches and exception monitoring. This customer estimates using MAX will save them hundreds of hours per year and thousands of dollars in overhead. According to their project lead, MAX has become a staple in their daily operations. with MAX now live across all fulfillment customers, adoption of our advanced AI features is accelerating.

Upcoming Q4 product launches keep us on track to monetize AI-powered solutions next year. SPS Commerce has also embedded agents internally to accelerate fulfillment customer onboarding from contract close to the first live transaction. Since adopting a genic onboarding, hundreds of suppliers have achieved full compliance with new trading partners within 24 hours. Agentic onboarding is also strengthening our competitive position. particularly when new customers plan to integrate their ERP system with the SPS network. In Q3, this accelerated onboarding capability was a deciding factor in securing multiple new customer wins. We are prepared to move as quickly as our customers need us to and delivering faster time to value.

To date, we have completed many complex ERP integration and onboarding projects in less than 30 days and we expect to shorten these cycles even further as we advance our Agent capability. For example, a manufacturer of safety and fall protection gear needed 21 integration setup and tested in 2 weeks accelerated onboarding with AI agents help meet the deadline, and our validation agent flagged incorrect carrier codes and shipping cereal IDs that would have caused advanced shipping notice compliance issues and potential retailer chargebacks. The customer was able to address both errors before production.

Similarly, the world's leading dairy company partnered with SPS Commerce following a major acquisition to rapidly onboard over 70 trading partners and avoid delays in order fulfillment of highly perishable products. with a genic onboarding, SVS accelerated testing and business rule configuration for new connections, successfully executing a high stages go live in just weeks. In summary, the progress we have made to date with our Agentic transformation initiatives, both across our product portfolio and internally has exceeded my expectations. I want to recognize all of Team SBS for their Agentic-first mindset and commitment to this transformation. Historically, customers have trusted SPS' vast network intelligence to deliver connectivity and compliance with their trading partners.

Today, all of our transaction, compliance and proprietary data is powering our genic AI solutions, enabling MAX to detect process disruptions and anomalies. This strong quantifiable ROI will result in direct monetization of our AI capabilities and drive a higher volume of transactions across our network as customers increasingly rely on SPS solutions as the indispensable intelligence tools they need to manage an efficient supply chain. Notably, we are moving fast while maintaining operational discipline and exceeding our margin targets. With our genic strategy advancing, we are uniquely positioned to deliver sustainable, profitable growth backed by the combination of AI and SPS' intelligent network, a powerful and durable competitive moat that no one else can match.

With that, I'll turn it over to Joe to discuss our financial results.

Thank you, Chad, and welcome, everyone. We reported a strong third quarter of 2026 as core business growth exceeded expectations while we delivered significant margin expansion. Revenue was $197.6 million, a 4% increase over Q3 of last year. Recurring revenue grew 4% year-over-year. Two factors impacting the growth rate in the quarter. One is the divestiture of the 3P revenue recovery business on June 30, 2026, and the second factor is the incremental impact from our 1P Amazon take rate business. Together, the divestiture and the Amazon take rate business negatively impacted revenue growth by 500 basis points in the quarter. In reference to the divestiture of the 3P revenue recovery business, we said in the Q2 call that we expect divestiture to reduce second half 2026 revenue by approximately $10.5 million.

We continue to believe the divestiture sharpens our focus on the strategic opportunity with 1P suppliers. The 1P Amazon opportunity continues to be important to our revenue recovery growth strategy for the long term with a $750 million addressable market. In reference to the impact from the Amazon take rate business for the quarter, it was driven by two factors. First, we saw higher-than-anticipated conversion of take rate revenue to subscription revenue. While this has created a headwind to revenue in the second half of 2026, we expected to benefit the business in the midterm and align with our long-term strategy for revenue recovery. Second, take rate revenue was lower than anticipated, resulting from recent Amazon policy changes that impacted our 1P take rate customers.

As a reminder, under the take rate model, Revenue is recognized as a percentage of the actual funds successfully recovered from Amazon suppliers. In recovery, yields are tied to the retailer policies. In the quarter, Amazon has implemented certain policy changes which have been unfavorable to recovery yields. Our current go-to-market approach is focused on subscription model, the take rate model remains common in Amazon revenue recovery market, and allows us to capture a larger share of enterprise customers.

Looking at our customer growth, the total number of recurring revenue customers in Q3 increased sequentially to 46,700 and an average revenue per customer was 16,200. The divestiture reduced our total customer count by approximately 7,300 3P customers, who are smaller than our average customer size, which positively impacted ARPU in Q3. Adjusted EBITDA increased 17% to $70.9 million or 36% of revenue, outperforming our long-term margin target of 35%. This reflects SPS' strong operational execution as we continue to unlock efficiencies across the organization. Looking ahead, we plan to provide an updated adjusted EBITDA target on our fourth quarter conference call. We expect continued margin expansion to be driven by operating leverage and increasing use of onboarding agents, which today is reflected in our gross margin expansion.

Adjusted gross margin, which excludes stock-based compensation expense, was 73% in Q3 and improved 170 basis points year-over-year. Adjusted sales and marketing was 20%, G&A was 13% and R&D was 7% in Q3 and all decline year-over-year as a percentage of revenue. Turning to liquidity and cash flows. We ended the quarter with total cash equivalents and short-term investments of $184 million. Free cash flow for the quarter was $58.5 million, bringing our trailing 12-month free cash flow to $202.6 million, up 37% year-over-year. In Q3 2026, we deployed 84% of free cash flow to repurchase $48.8 million of SPS shares. Now turning to guidance. For the fourth we expect revenue to be in the range of $199.3 million to $201.3 million, represent approximately 4% growth at the midpoint, which includes a negative impact from the Amazon revenue recovery take rate business and the divested business.

Excluding these impacts, our underlying fourth quarter revenue growth is expected to be between 8% and 9%. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $72.0 million to $74.0 million. We expect fully diluted earnings per share to be in the range of $0.74 to $0.79 with fully diluted weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 36.0 million shares. We expect non-GAAP diluted income per share to be in the range of $1.31 to $1.36, with stock-based compensation expense of approximately $170 million, depreciation expense of approximately $6.1 million and amortization expense of approximately $12.3 million. For the full year 2026, we expect revenue in the range of $786.9 million to $788.9 million representing approximately 5% growth over 2025 at the midpoint of the guided range.

Excluding the previous mentioned impacts of our underlying full year 2026 revenue is projected to grow high single digits. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $267.4 million to $269.4 million, reflecting an adjusted EBITDA margin of 34% at the midpoint an increase of approximately 330 basis points compared to full year 2025. We effect fully diluted earnings per share to be in the range of $2.29 to $2.35, and with fully weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 36.6 million shares. We write non-GAAP diluted income per share to be in the range of $5.05 to $5.11 and with stock-based compensation expense of approximately $69.5 million, depreciation expense of approximately $24.1 million and amortization expense for the year of approximately $40.8 million.

For the remainder of the year, on a quarterly basis, investors should model approximately 30% effective tax rate calculated on GAAP pretax net earnings. In summary, our financial results clearly demonstrate the strong operating leverage embedded in our business model. Expanding our adjusted EBITDA margin to 36% underscores both our commitment to disciplined cost management and the tangible efficiency gains we're unlocking through agented customer onboarding. With that, I'd like to open the call to questions.

[Operator Instructions]. And our first question for today will come from Scott Berg with Needham.

Chad, Joe, I got a couple of things here. Let's start off with the fourth quarter guidance. It looks like the actual guidance is a little bit below what was implied from the third quarter? And given your commentary on the changes at Amazon, I guess the first question is that the driver for all the changes with the implied fourth quarter revenue guidance. And I guess second question within the Amazon impact relates to -- is this kind of a permanent change or impact to -- I assume that is that revenue recovery business, should we think about annualizing that difference in terms of the revenue recovery there? Or does this get mitigated maybe as you move more of the customers from that transactional arrangement to more of a subscription agreement.

Yes, Scott, I'll take the first part of that. So on the revision of the guidance, got 100% of that was related to the Amazon policy changes and the acceleration of moving customers from take rate to subscription. If we didn't have the impact of those changes, we would have raised guidance on the year. So that was the driver.

Yes. And I'll give you a color on the overall strategy. I mean we remain confident in revenue recovery as a product category. If you exclude the Amazon take rate portion revenue recovery is the fastest growing portion of our overall business. we have seen these policy change headwinds with Amazon. However, Amazon is a major portion of this ecosystem. We're still bringing on new customers especially with multiple retailer support when -- and Amazon is a key component of that together typically with Walmart and Target as well. And in terms of the revenue model, we have been successful in converting some of the take rate customers. You may recall that Carbon 6 was take rate only.

And now some of those have converted to subscription. And in fact, that moved a little quicker in the quarter than we had expected, which long term is a positive for us. What I will say, though, is the market still is take rate, right? So there still is some take rate out there. Competitors are offering take rate. So it's not like we expect the take rate business to go to 0 over time. But I strongly believe that as we add more features consistent with our product strategy, especially on chargeback avoidance, not just on the recovery side, that's going to certainly make the product more compelling overall and customers are probably more inclined to pay for that type of capability on a subscription basis.

Got it. Helpful. And then from a follow-up question, Chad, can you give us some color on what the net new customer environment was like we go back to the third quarter call, I know you all talked about some improving trends around enablement campaigns and I think new customers coming from some of your ERP channel partners. But I just want to understand if that environment has improved kind of as you had expected 90 days ago. And will that ultimately drive customer count ex the carbon 6 divestiture to still be in line with your expectations to be about flattish for the year from the beginning?

Yes. Sure, Scott. So on the retail programs, the retail activity in the quarter was quite strong as we expected. The activity continues here in Q4, and we're even carrying some momentum into 2027. What I would say on the results in the quarter is that the monetization of those retail programs based on the retailers they were did skew a bit more towards ARPU contribution, the customer count contribution. On the ERP stuff, a little bit slower in the mid-market ERP area. I think there's room as companies sort through their AI and ERP decisions for that to pick up in the future.

And overall, probably close to that sort of net neutral customer count that we had described earlier.

Next question will come from Chris Quintero with Morgan Stanley.

This is Beatrice on for Chris Quintero. Congrats on the impressive margin progress? Can you unpack where you're seeing the greatest operating leverage, whether that's AI-driven efficiencies and onboarding and customer support or broader automation or expense discipline and how much runway remains for the further expansion

Yes. Thanks for the question. I think there's a couple of areas that are really driving that margin improvement overall. And the first, I would say on the gross margin side, I think that's been the biggest driver of our overall improvement. And there's a couple of things going on there. Most of the success there year-to-date. Is that related to the genetic onboarding because that's just been more of a recent rollout that's still ramping. I think that will drive a lot more of the margin improvement over the next 12 to 18 months. which gives me a lot of confidence that there's a lot of room to run on the gross margin line.

Most of the year-to-date benefits have come from the process improvements we've kind of talked about that we made over the last 12 to 15 months. The team has been really laser focus on these processes even before the Agentic onboarding, we've really been able to build out the team in a way that can scale in a much more efficient manner. So that would be the first area what we're seeing improvements on the gross margin side, driving bottom line improvements.

The second area I would say would be on the G&A side. We've done -- over the last couple of years, I've talked about this last time, which is we had made some investments in the back office upgrade some of our systems, some of our infrastructure, and we're starting to see the real economies of scale of those investments. So I would say historically, I thought G&A was running a little high based on those investments, and you're starting to see that come down. And that's a combination of getting the kinds of scale on those investments, but also some of the internal use cases we're starting to see on the AI front within the organization.

So it's a combination of those two things are probably the biggest driver. And to your question about how we see it going from here, we have a high level of confidence, like I said, that we can continue to drive margin improvements and a lot of the future will be driven by some of the agentive things we're working on. We've already talked about the onboarding, but we're also doing things on the go-to-market side. We're building things across the G&A team as well. So feel really good about what we've accomplished to date, but also see a lot more upside going forward.

Got it. And then can you just expand on what the specific Amazon policy changes were? Are these new policy changes from what impacted you in the past?

Yes. These policy changes related to the situation when one of our suppliers makes a short shipment to Amazon, also a process around our ability to re dispute around policy redispute submission.

And both of them were new in the quarter.

Next question will come from Dylan Becker with William Blair.

This is Jackson Bogli on for Dylan Becker. I was just wondering if you could give us a sense of how customers are responding to MAX now that's generally available in this quarter. maybe how you see the impact on day-to-day workflows for customers translating into deeper engagement with the SBS platform over time?

Yes. Absolutely, Jackson. So we're seeing really positive feedback from the customers that are in Max chat. In fact, we're seeing quite a bit of return usage. So the product will prompt them to go in, begin usage really high return usage in the product. And then as we're moving forward in our development plans for MAX agents, which will be the primary monetization mechanism going forward, we are already in co-development a group of about 20 customers in the MAX agent and we expect the early adopter program for that to be expanding to about 200 customers as we turn from kind of Q4 to Q1. And a large number of those customers are heavy Max chat users who are very anxious to get access to the new MAX aging capability that's coming.

Great. That's super helpful. And then maybe one for Joe or Chad, as you look at over the next few years, what gives you the most confidence in the durability of the growth algorithm? And maybe within that, just any comments on capital allocation across buybacks, M&A and organic investment also that Joe touched on earlier.

Yes. Definitely highly confident in the growth algorithm going forward. I mean if you look at our results here, the core really did go strongly and actually exceeded our expectations. Also consistent with how we've been describing the growth algorithm where we expect to drive more on the ARPU side, certainly, we can modestly grow customer count, but we expect to drive most of it through the ARPU side. And the big drivers of that ARPU growth going forward are going to be the continued expansion with existing customers, primarily driven by adding more connections on the network the upselling and cross-selling of analytics and revenue recovery.

And now with the emergence of these AI capabilities on top of that, that will give us another upselling skew there. And what I will add is the steady momentum of us to be able to serve larger and larger customers, right? So as we've done a number of things to both our product portfolio and our service delivery model, we are increasingly being able to serve larger and larger customers, which has a positive impact on ARPU.

Yes. And then on the capital allocation question, right now, we've got our buyback in place. We're buying back in the market every day, and we think that's the best use of capital. Now obviously, over the next 12 to 18 months as things change. We always keep our options open. But right now, that's going to be the main focus on buying our stock back with our capital.

Next question will come from George Kurosawa with Citi.

Okay. Maybe just to follow up on that question about growth durability I know I'm a quarter early here, but as we think about 2027, will be sharpening our pencils on modeling, you laid out the 8% to 9% exit rate on the core business. Is that maybe the right way to think about the approach for how you guys are thinking about next year or just maybe puts and takes on what might drive this business to sustain growth next year?

Yes. Thanks for the question, George. I think without getting -- we don't want to get too far ahead of 2027. So obviously, I'm not going to provide any guidance, but we believe that the momentum we're seeing on the core. We'll continue, as we see right now, we feel really confident about that going into 2027. I think there's a couple of things going on from a growth algorithm and Chad covered it a little bit earlier, but I think there is the other thing that's going on is that our GRR continues to improve on a year-over-year basis, right?

A lot of things we're investing in as it relates to agent onboarding shortening that like the time it gets to get on board. The things we're doing with MAX and MAX chat, I think that's going to drive a lot of stickiness in the product. I think it's going to allow us to increase price over time. And so I think there's a couple of things going on in the core that gives us confidence in kind of the growth algorithm that Chad was talking about and the way we see 2027. And obviously, on the Q4 call, we'll put -- we'll provide a little bit more color on 2027.

Okay. That's great color. And then I did want to follow up on this Agentic onboarding. Gross margins seem like saw some healthy expansion in the quarter. To what extent has Agentic onboarding impacted Q3? I know you said it's relatively early still. And then if you just think about the number of maybe onboarding projects that have gone through this process. How has that started to trend? How do you think about in terms of the share of onboarding that can be done identically as we think through next year.

Yes. So I think about the gross margin impact specifically from Agentic onboarding even, frankly, is kind of minimal. As Joe mentioned earlier, most of that's been driven over work the team has done on the onboarding process in the previous 18 months. However, the Agentic onboarding has certainly helped us in the quarter with respect to new customer acquisition. We had several competitive opportunities where the customer was integrating their ERP system with their EDI provider, those customers specifically chose SPS Commerce based on the speed at which we could onboard them to our network.

We think not only will the speed of that onboarding then obviously more efficient and drives continued gross margin improvements, but truly be a competitive differentiator we'll probably unlock a little bit more demand in the market as well because if you're not facing a several month implementation, you're probably more likely to go forward with the project. Where we are today is that we've had hundreds of customers that are kind of on our more simple web form onboarding be done in a number of hours with agents. And then I'd say select handful of more complex ERP integrated projects be done with the agent-assisted onboarding and agent-assisted validation but it has a really big momentum, and we expect more and more projects to be done this way in Q4 and in 2027.

And George, I'll add one more piece of color there. We probably got another 12 months of road map on genetic onboarding, like Chad said, we've started with kind of the easier customers, the well fulfillment customers. And as we move across the different ERP integrations, we're knocking those off 1 at a time. So what you're going to see over the next 12 months is as we roll out more and more genic onboarding across different customers you'll see that margin improvement over the next 12 to 18 months that will set us up for even longer-term improvement.

Next question will come from Matt VanVliet with Cantor.

I guess I wanted to dig in a little bit more on the Amazon changes I guess, how are the economics for the customer contracts differing when they switch to subscription? How should we think about that playing out over a couple of year period and then any other color on like what percentage of those customers have actually shifted to the subscription model so far?

Yes. So typically, a customer will have kind of a proven history of recoveries at a certain level. and also see the value of the incremental product features that we're adding to help them with the analytics around chargebacks in general, other analytics around the whole recovery process. And as they see that value, then there's kind of a conversion point based on the volume of historical recoveries into a new subscription amount. We are leading with subscription in our go-to-market. We still do take new business as a take rate when competitive requirements demand that. And there's still some room as the majority of carbon 6 customers we acquired in this area were on take rates. It's still the minority of those customers that have converted a subscription, but that conversion is underway.

Okay. And then curious on any commentary you have around the overall competitive landscape and how your retailer enablement efforts are going? Any traction to speak of there? And just sort of how you're viewing that business longer term?

Yes. So the retail programs continue to be a great lead source for new supplier customers into our business. Q3, in particular, we had some very large programs, as I mentioned previously, that interaction tended to be more monetized on the ARPU side. There were new customers that came in through those programs as well, but a little bit more skewed to the ARPU side. and demand for that offering, where we're digitally enabling all the suppliers for these big retailers and distributors. We continue to be unique in offering that to the market. And as we continue to explain all the benefits of that in the market, seeing some upticks in demand for that solution.

Next question will come from Lachlan Brown with Rothschild & Company.

Chad, Joe, thanks for the questions. On impact that you mentioned that you would have raised the full year revenue guidance. Had there not been the impact of the Amazon 1P policy and revenue changes. So could you just dive into what went better than expected in the core fulfillment business in the quarter?

Yes, I think a couple of things, one, better than expected. I think one, Chad talked about this. These retail campaigns that were really strong coming into the quarter. Those really converted into higher ARPU. So I think our ARPU was stronger than we expected. The other area is the GRR. It was really solid in the quarter. It continues to increase on a year-over-year basis, and that came ahead of plan. And then we continue to see momentum in the subscription side of the revenue recovery business. And so I think the combination of those 3 things really kind of exceeded our expectations in the quarter.

And can you also update us on the campaign pipeline visibility over the next couple of quarters? I guess specifically how is the current mix tracking between your customer onboarding versus expanding connections on those existing accounts. And I guess, last year, you noted that holiday season dynamics caused some enablement campaign delays. So I just want to just double check that you're not seeing the same thing here again this year.

Yes. So the overall pipeline and activity on programs right now is strong. It will be strong in Q4, and we expect to carry some of that into '27 we are not anticipating any delays. But in some of those programs here for Q4 have not actually kicked off yet. So they could be subject to delay, but we're not anticipating that. And I'd say the contribution sometimes difficult until we get the program underway. I would just remind everyone kind of with our growth algorithm, we do expect a lower growth rate on the customer additions and a higher growth rate on the ARPU. And as the programs came in with in Q3, they came in exactly consistent with that overall growth algorithm.

The next question will come from Mark Schappel with Loop Capital Markets.

Chad, could you talk a little bit a little bit about what you're seeing in early demand for Decision Intelligence and maybe how it's priced relative to the former analytics offering?

Yes, Mark. Great. Yes. So what we've done here is, we mentioned this in the last call, we completely replatform to the technology of our analytics product. And as part of that went through a renaming exercise. So you'll hear us referring that to Decision Intelligence going forward that also follow our segment reporting in the financials. A couple of things that have been real positives on this. One, the customer sentiment and the supporting retention metrics the customers that have gone on to this new platform are more favorable than the old platform. So we're seeing positive momentum there.

And then additionally, we're more competitive in new business with this new platform. And then I'd say, overall, this new platform is really necessary to set us up to execute on our road map for Decision Intelligence, which includes a number of AI capabilities, which we expect to be able to launch there in the first half of 2027. So overall, the new platform, who knows that the new name is helping. I think the new platform certainly is helping, but you'll hear us refer to that as Decision Intelligence going forward.

Great. And then Eduardo has been on board now for about a year or so, as Chief Commercial Officer in that role. What are some of the more meaningful changes you're making in the sales -- to sales coverage or incentives or even account ownership? Or what are you planning going forward there?

Yes, absolutely. So on the retail side, one of the changes we've made is really segmenting that sales force into existing customer account managers and other sales executives focused on new business. this positive momentum in the retail activity right now. I would say that's one of many factors. But between Eduardo and Tony, who leads our retail business. They've done a nice job with those changes and those have been positive. As we look at our customer treatment strategy on the supplier side, we've really aligned customer success and sales much more closely I think that has been beneficial to this ARPU expansion as we're driving more expansion with the customers, driving cross-selling. And as Joe mentioned, the improved retention metrics, I think, are also coming from those improved customer treatment strategies. The team has really done a nice job on the customer treatment strategy work, and that's paying off from the metrics now.

The next question will come from Parker Lane with Stifel.

This is Jack McShane on for Parker. I wanted to go back to the topic of growth now hinging a bit more on ARPU and just kind of tick deeper, like is this a temporary mix? Or will cross-sell and attach be the material key drivers of the business in the -- into the midterm in '27 and beyond. And how do you weigh the opportunities in cross-sell, whether it be new connections, ancillary products like analytics and MAX.

Yes. So there's really three factors driving that ARPU. It's certainly the largest one is expansion of the existing customers. It's definitely a land and expand model. We tend to get customers with one trading partner when we land them in one of those retail programs. and then we expand them from there. Obviously, analytics revenue recovery are addressable to the medium and large customers that we have. And then we'll have the MAX agent SKU on board in 2027 to be another product there.

And as I mentioned earlier, is as we move more and more of our capabilities, with the ERP integrations, we're able to serve medium and large customers. that has a positive impact on ARPU as well. So we continue to drive new customers through the retail programs through the channel programs. But I think kind of keep in mind, a lot of this customer count every single quarter is being driven by very low revenue customers, both in the ads and both in the churn. But all of those customers that we start off through a retail program as a one TP, we have the potential to expand a portion of those up to be some of our highest value customers from there.

And Jack, just to add one, ranking them. I think the expansion of trading partners is still the biggest driver of ARPU. And then after that is the cross-sell of analytics in revenue recovery. And then next year, obviously, we'll have a little bit more to sell with the MAX agents. And so that would feed into that cross-sell opportunity.

Great. And then I'd love to hear your philosophy moving into next year as you begin monetizing MAX, how do you plan to strike the balance of broad adoption within your base and monetization that so many of your software peers have been attempting to figure out over the past year or so. And where is that AI budget coming from within your base?

Yes. Terrific question, we will favor broad adoption. I mean, we believe that this provides value and the more customers have access to it and use it, the value becomes more apparent for them, and that will allow us to take price over the relationship with the customer. So we will be charging for the MAX agents in 2027. But to your point, our programs are going to be focused on customer adoption in 2027 versus trying to maximize price before the customer really sees the value.

Your next question will come from Clark Wright with D.A. Davidson.

I wanted to touch on the agenda capabilities that you guys are bringing to market. What makes SPS Commerce uniquely positioned to provide the agenda capabilities to organizations versus what can be achieved with off-the-shelf AI offerings?

Yes. So the data really is what makes the difference here. So if you look at the underlying data that is driving our Agentic use cases, first, there's all the data that the customer has in our network. And keep in mind, this is usually a super set of their supply chain data. Not all this data is making it back to their ERP systems or their warehouse management systems or transportation management systems. So there's probably the most robust data set of supply chain data a customer has is going to be on the SPS network.

Second is we're seeing major trending across all the major buying organizations that run across our network. So obviously, we're not going to share customers' competitors' data, but what we can do through our agents is see certain trending with certain trading partners, certain patterns that may exist and then what's really critical to all this, and honestly, I think underappreciated out there, is the proprietary databases that we have around retailer trading expectations for their supply chain partners. So we -- and many of these are undocumented as well. So we have these robust rule data sets that dictate exactly how the supply chain is expected to be performed for each of the retailers on our network and the agents have access to all of that. So when we combine the customers' data, the trending data on the network in these very unique supply chain rule sets we have about each major retailer, that combination is really unlocking some very powerful use cases. And if you looked at just more generic AI tools out there, they would not have that same level of access or understanding.

Appreciate that commentary. And then I wanted to potentially ask you just about the policy changes. Is there anything that the company can do proactively to minimize the financial impact of new policy changes like what we have seen in recent years?

Yes. I think this strategy of adding more features in our product strategy to be about a total charge-back management and chargeback prevention solution and have less of the value proposition be just about the recoveries combined with the overall migration to subscription revenue that we discussed I think those would be a couple of things that are mitigating factors.

Overall, I will just say that we do have competitors in the market that sell Amazon on a take rate basis. When we offer that, especially in larger enterprise deals, it is helpful in winning new customers. In the quarter, we utilized our overall multi-retailer approach to win some very large enterprise retailers on -- or suppliers onto revenue recovery. So I do think we'll need to have some type of offering to take rate at least for the next couple of years based on competitive dynamics.

Our next question will come from Joe Vruwink with Baird.

Great. I think of the network, it was set up to support omnichannel fulfillment we now have the rise of personal agents factoring into the future of commerce. How do you think of that as a driver? And I guess if there's multiple ways to take a customer enablement activity and actually needing to upgrade your supply chain for this as a prospect? And what does SDS need to do on the back end to participate effectively if this is going to be a new channel?

Yes. Well, first, congrats [indiscernible] Joe. Yes, great question. I think the commerce agents are going to drive kind of a new level of expectation on the supply chain as a result of the personalization and choices that are going to come from that. I think that will, just like we saw with omnichannel increase the requirements around collaboration, the timing of collaboration as we move more and more toward these kind of instantaneous delivery expectations. It really puts a more need for a network like SPS to facilitate these supply chain transactions.

I will also add that as commerce agents start to move back in the supply chain to merchandising agents and vendor management agents. These are the things that we're looking at in the midterm and I think position SPS very well. to further assist retailers in how they're managing their supply chain as Agentic technology moves from just the consumer back to more of the supply chain and buying operations in retailers and distributors.

Okay. That's great. And then maybe, Joe, just to be clear on some of the math. So I think if I just take the divestment evenly in 3Q and 4Q that's like a 3-point revenue impact. You're talking about 5 points in total to the 1Q changes, 2 points or like $4 million? And I guess within that, how much is truly a headwind given the policy changes versus just a mechanical impact where transitioning to a sub that's worth slightly less for a period of time.

Yes. A majority of it is from the policy changes, Joe, that would be a majority of that impact. And then the conversion from take rate to subscription is a smaller portion of that.

I'm showing no further questions in the queue. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation, and have a wonderful day. You may now disconnect.

Welcome, everyone, to Day 2 of Citi's Global TMT Conference. My name is George Kurosawa. I'm on the software team here at Citi. I'm pleased to be joined by Joe Del Preto, CFO of SPS Commerce. Welcome, Joe.

Nice to be here. Thanks for having me.

Maybe just to start, for anyone newer to the story, if you could just frame the SPS journey, where you feel like the company is at today, the value proposition that you're delivering to your customers.

Yes. So, for sure. So SPS has been around for a long time, right? The business was started in the late '90s and really the age of the Internet really changed the way that suppliers and retailers can, kind of, work together. So at the core, what SPS does is it built a managed network between some of the largest buying organizations, like think of big retailers, grocers, industrial suppliers, industrial distributors and all their suppliers. And we manage all the communication, all the EDI communication, API communication, all the digital requirements between the large retailers and grocers and the suppliers. And the way we did, we took a very different approach.

We built a network. So once you connect to our network, so for example, when one of the suppliers, for example, let's say, a Target supplier connects on our network, they have access to all the other retailers. So for example, they want to also connect with Costco. They don't need to know how to understand how to connect with Costco. They don't need to know what their EDI requirements are or their API requirements. Once they connect with us once, we manage that entire network.

So, over the years, we have about 3,500 buying organizations and a little over 40,000 suppliers, what we call our customers on the network. And we, kind of, manage that network across day-to-day across those different constituents.

Got it. And I want to dive into the business, particularly the MAX products. Maybe just before that, there was some public reporting about MAX disengagement, maybe that you all are potentially exploring a sale. I understand there might be constraints on what you can say, but if there's any, just give you the floor.

Yes. No, obviously, we can't comment on that. And what I would tell you right now, internally, the business is just -- everyone internally is just focused on driving the business forward. So no comment on that, as you can imagine, but we feel really good about the momentum on the business. I'm sure we're going to get into it a little bit, George, but there's a lot of things that are working well right now. And so I think we're pretty positive about the future of SPS.

Okay. Great. And when -- I just think about the timing of your joining, you joined after the 2025 Investor Day, you had established kind of financial framework, high single-digit growth, 70% to 75% gross margins, 35% EBITDA margins. Looking -- having been in the seat a few quarters now, how do you think about that framework now? Are there components of that, that feel maybe more conservative? Maybe just how has your confidence in those targets evolved?

Yes. What I would say is still the same level of high confidence in the growth rate in the high single digits. Nothing's changed there. I do think over the last, what I would say, since Investor Day, I think we've made a lot of strides in the internal use of AI that we believe can drive pretty good margin improvement.

We're not changing. We talked about over about 200 basis points year-over-year in operating margin improvement. But some of the things we're seeing as it relates to agents that are going to help with onboarding, agents that we're building for the go-to-market side and a couple of other areas, we think that we probably -- if you were to say anything was a little bit on the conservative side or I would say there's probably a little bit more room on the margin side over the next couple of years based on some of the things we're seeing internally.

Okay. Interesting. I want to dig into that more later, but maybe we can start on the MAX side on the growth. Obviously, the MAX product set going through the beta process. It seems like through that process, the product has started to evolve. That seems to be morphing into more of a top of funnel product and MAX Monitor moving into more of an agentic type structure. Can you talk about the learnings that you've had? What about the customer behavior signal drove some of those evolutions?

Yes. So we released -- it's now available, GA, for all 40,000 customers of ours on the MAX Chat side or what we're calling MAX Conversation. And the adoption is really high. We're really excited about what we're seeing. And what it's actually allowing us to do, we can see what people are putting into the chat and the problems they're trying to solve through their supply chain. For example, we saw a customer find over $300,000 of missing invoices that they never sent to a customer for orders they delivered. And so what they're able to do is find these issues in their supply chain through various chats.

In that example, it took about 30 chats for them to get to that answer, right? Because they're looking, they're prompting it, they're learning. What we believe is what we're doing is we're using all that information and all the things we're seeing that are people that are putting in the chat, and we're using that to build the agents. So instead of you trying to go through chat and find the supply chain issues, what if we just had an agent, for example, that just made sure that for every single order that you delivered, you created an invoice. And then it alerted you that, hey, by the way, you delivered these orders to Trader Joe's, you have to invoice them. Or by the way, you got these purchase orders from Costco, you have to acknowledge. We see a lot of times where they might receive purchase orders and a lot of the big retailers, there's a certain time horizon in which you have to respond and acknowledge that you received the purchase order from the retailer.

What if we had an agent that did that for you? And then if you think even further along, what if the agent just didn't -- went and did that thing? Because right now, it will tell you, oh, by the way, you didn't send these invoices. Well, what is the next evolution of the agents we're building just went ahead and create those invoices for you. So we think there's a huge amount of upside in the way that the MAX Agents, which is the next phase past chat, and that's what we're going to monetize, can really drive a lot of supply chain efficiencies. And because we built this managed network where we have all the data across all these retailers and grocers and all these suppliers, we think we're best positioned to be able to monetize that information and that data for our customers. So we're pretty excited about where it's headed. We'll probably have our first agents rolled out later this year kind of in beta form. We're working through pricing and packaging right now. And then in 2027, I think you'll see us launch those more broadly.

Got it. It seems like you already alluded to an example here, but just talking through the ROI of AI is kind of a big theme at this conference. how do you feel like the most tangible proof points that you've seen in terms of what you can deliver?

Yes. I think in our case, what we are most excited about is I think we can deliver hard ROI for our customers. We can tell them, for example, these are the purchase orders you missed. These are the invoices you didn't send. These are the drop ship orders that you haven't acknowledged yet. Like, we can tell you, like, right there and then what you're missing and what you're doing. So real ROI. And then on top of that, if you think of -- if we start doing things for you that you had people doing before, for example, like I said, if we can go in and actually fix those things for you and say, by the way, used to have all these people, for example, had to acknowledge purchase orders. What if we just identify the ones acknowledge for them and then the business kept going. You don't need all these people sitting around doing, like, managing the supply chain. So we actually think in our scenario, we can provide hard ROI on our AI because we're actually identifying real issues in your supply chain.

Right. Maybe on the commercialization side, I appreciate it might be a little bit early, but maybe you could talk through how you're thinking initially about exposing customers to this product, how you're thinking about packaging it?

Yes. So we haven't finalized the pricing and packaging yet on the agents. But the way we're thinking about it is the way you'll pay for them are probably based on how many agents do you need, right? We might have a different agent for doing one type of activity versus another. We might have different agents depending on are you integrated with an ERP and that might be a separate agent. So the number of agents that you have running, the quantity of data you're consuming.

So, for example, are these agents consuming a little amount of data or a large amount of data, so some kind of consumption-based approach, probably. And then how frequently are you running these agents? Do you want these things running every day, every second, every week? And so a combination of those things are probably going to drive the way we kind of price and package the agents. Some of them will be more sophisticated. Some of them will be less sophisticated. Are you using our Web Fulfillment product? Are you using System Automation where we're integrating the ERP. So there's a couple of different factors that will probably drive the way we price and package them.

Makes sense. On the build versus buy, maybe another key pillar of the debate here at the conference. How are you seeing that evolve in your customer base? Are there any examples where you've seen customers maybe try to in-house some of the things that SPS has traditionally offered? And what about your product positioning do you feel like maybe insulates you from that?

Yes. I think we are -- so in our space, and George, you probably know this, like, the build versus -- the build yourself has always been something we've competed against. So this is -- for us, this is not a new idea or concept. Our biggest competitors have built tools, do-it-yourself tools. So they give you, for example, a piece of software that you can go build out and you have to manage all your integrations in the different retailers. You have to build all -- you have to stay on top of all the compliance from the retailers, you can do it all yourself. Yes, those tools will be a little bit more efficient with AI, but we're not -- our approach has always been you can go do it yourself, but we believe the managed network approach where you connect once is the better approach. And so we believe with AI, I don't know that, that necessarily changes that dynamic in any way. We actually think we have a bigger value prop because of our managed network and the ability to apply AI to the things we talked about versus do-it-yourself. So that's always been the case in our space, a do-it-yourself versus the network approach. So I don't know that AI dramatically changes that dynamic.

Makes sense. On the 1P Revenue Recovery side, I want to touch on that. You divested the 3P side business that's a little more focused. I think even when you had initially acquired those assets, the plan was always to ramp up the cross-sell motion through the course of 2026. If you could just talk through the maturity of that motion. Do you feel like it's fully ramped up? Are there any incremental investments you need to make there?

Yes. I would not say it's fully ramped up. I think a lot of the first half of this year, we were really focused on this 3P business and whether or not divesting it, what we want to do with it. And so I think that probably distracted us a little bit from the overall kind of go-to-market strategy. Now that, that is divested, what you'll see in the back half of this year going to next year is a real focus on the 1P side of the business, making sure that the sales incentive plans are properly inside of the sales team, like, historically, the -- if you were a rep that was selling into a customer on the fulfillment side, you didn't have any incentive to cross-sell one of our other products. That's going to start to change at the end of this year going into next year where a sales rep will be incentivized to bring in other products into their sales cycle where before, there wasn't a lot of sales incentives to do that.

So I think a lot of that's going to evolve in the back half of this year. We're also moving or leading with the -- on the 1P side, the subscription model, the SupplyPike business we bought in 2024, which is more -- it's all based on subscription base versus take rate. We're leading with that now going forward. We will sell the take rate business, which was the old C6 business on the 1P side. The customer really wants it, but we're trying to migrate customers off of the take rate, because of the volatility and it's less predictable, to the subscription model. So all of that will happen in the back half of this year. So you'll see some advantages of the cross-selling throughout this year, but I think most of that you'll see come through in 2027.

Got it. Maybe sticking on these adjustments to the go-to-market side. I think you started -- retailer campaigns have been the core of the new logo growth driver. It seems like you guys are starting to expand into maybe some new channels to acquire new logos, maybe exploring some traditional SEO. Talk us through what you're thinking there? And to the extent that spend has started, what are you seeing kind of the initial conversion rates, funnel build?

Yes. So, like, the biggest driver of our top of funnel is the retail programs and working with the retailers. And then number two is probably the channel, like, we have a lot of relationships with a lot of the big ERPs and the different VARs, and that's another big driver for us. On the marketing side, it's probably been an underinvested area. And it's probably not so much on the SEO side. It's probably more on a couple of areas. We haven't done a really good job marketing to existing customers, product marketing, for example, letting the customers know about things like Analytics or Revenue Recovery or letting them know about the MAX products that are coming out.

So I think there's a huge opportunity. We've made a lot of enhancements to our existing product that a lot of our existing customers don't know about. So I think, one, product marketing into the existing customer base is a focus area of marketing. And then the other one on the new customer side is more probably upmarket into the mid-market enterprise. So probably less more direct marketing campaigns, more of that account-based marketing versus your traditional SEO type of spend. So that's probably where the marketing team is spending more time. It hasn't been a huge part of our go-to-market budget historically. We're not -- this is not incremental dollars to the budget. It's more about the reallocation of where those resources were before. So we do believe there's an ability to drive more demand, not only within our existing customer base, but new customers with more of a marketing lens.

I see. And then when you think about the return you've had on those initial dollars that started to reallocate, how is that compared to some of the traditional channels?

Yes. What I would say is we're seeing really -- especially on the existing customer side, where we're trying to get in front of our existing customer base and not only on new products, but how do we understand the other retailers they're working with, making sure we have the full penetration, we're seeing some really good early returns on our ability to go out into our existing customer base. It's probably still too early on the net new side because we -- the retail and the channel is such a big part of that. It's definitely driving traffic, but probably not at the level yet where we're like, okay, this is a huge success because it's still so early. And those sales cycles take a little bit longer. Where we're seeing the real success is on the existing customer side.

Got it. Makes sense. On the just traditional enablement campaign piece, that side has been obviously historically a great engine for the business. It has, at times, been a little bit lumpy in terms of how it's driven new logos. Just talk us through your pipeline. Do you feel like the character of those campaigns has been changing at all? Just any patterns that you're seeing there?

Yes. What I would say is we definitely saw pressure in the back half of last year with the number of retail campaigns we were landing. And I think it was a combination of a couple of things. One, I definitely think the impact of the tariffs on the overall -- like the overall macro of our market put a lot of pressure on retailers. And then number two is before this year, or the first time coming into this year, the way the retail team was kind of organized was it was just one team and they had new and existing accounts. As you can imagine, for a sales rep, it was much easier to go and expand within existing retailers and land new programs than land net new retailers. So what happened was we brought a new leader in the middle of last year and coming into this year, what we reorganized the team where we have folks that are hunters and farmers. So we have a team dedicated to going to land net new retailers that we've ever had before and then folks that are focused on existing retailers and expanding within those and adding new programs. Since we've done that, the first half of this year, the number of retail programs on the net new side that we've been able to generate, I think, coming into this quarter was the highest pipeline we've ever seen. So that momentum in the first half of this year is going to lead to the success we expect to see in the back half of this year into next year. So I think it's a combination of a change in the go-to-market strategy. And also the retailers are in a much healthier position than they were a year ago. And so I think the combination of those two, we've talked about this is probably the strongest level of retail campaigns that we've seen over the last 4 or 5 years going into the back half of this year. We're very excited about the momentum we're seeing in that space. And so there's a couple of things that have been driving that.

Is that hunter motion already delivering results? I'd imagine it takes some time to build the pipeline and close some of those opportunities. Is that something that's already...

Already delivering results. We've got those campaigns. We have the campaigns closed, and now we have to go implement them, right? So that's what you'll see in the back half of the year. So the first half of the year, we're out there selling these campaigns. We definitely have a strong pipeline of new campaigns in the back half of the year. But then you have the cycle, you've got to reach out to all the suppliers. You've got to onboard them. And so that will all happen in the back half of this year, early next year. And as you know, that's all part of the land and expand motion. So what happens is when we land these new customers, they usually only end with that one retailer in the retailer program. And then we have a separate team that comes in after the fact and says, okay, now that we've landed this one retailer, let's get the rest of the folks you're working with. And that's kind of the expand motion. And so the near-term impact of landing those new customers from a revenue standpoint is quite small, but that's really the engine that drives the long-term growth is then we can add multiple retailers on top of that.

Right. Right. I think one of the things you initially alluded to talking about the long-term framework where you feel more confident is on the margin side. It seems like SPS, the business model, there's so many opportunities for internal application of AI. Talk us through maybe the top few use cases you're seeing and your progress so far on making improvements there.

Yes. So the top use case is going to be on the onboarding side. So our largest cost of revenue in the organization is the onboarding team. And this is the team that historically would manually onboard every one of our customers onto the network. Whether you're the smallest customer, you got a human being that came in and helped configure your -- the network between you and the retailer. And even on the large side, they'd come in, for example, if we're integrating into your ERP, let's say, NetSuite, they would help you with all your NetSuite configuration, help you integrate into our network.

So that's the largest cost -- that's the largest team at SPS in total. And we talked about a month ago, we did our first fully agentic onboarding for our web fulfillment customers. So not the ERP integrated customers, but think of the Web Fulfillment customer. On average, that would take maybe a day or two for a person to help onboard that customer. The agent can do it in minutes. And we did our first one about a month ago. Now we have hundreds of those a month going on. And so we're making real progress on the ability to identify the onboarding process. And then the next phase that you're going to see that we're starting to build right now are the agents for the system automation customers. So you think about each ERP we integrate with, we've got to build a separate agent to onboard the NetSuite configuration because that's different than the SAP configuration.

So now we're in the process of building agents that will help customers onboard on the System Automation side. And so if you think about overall, what used to take hundreds of people to onboard our customers, we believe, for example, on the System Automation side, let's say, it took you 6 to 9 months to onboard on SPS network manually, we can do that in a few weeks. And so not only will that create a much better customer experience, I think it's quicker time to -- think about time to revenue on those customers. The sooner we can onboard you, the sooner orders are flowing through, the sooner we can add more trading partners. And then on top of that, we believe it's going to really help with the retailers.

So one of the biggest pushbacks we get historically with retailers when we're trying to land new retailers is how long it takes to onboard suppliers. So we go into a retailer, we convince them that, hey, why don't we help make sure all your suppliers are digitally compliant and meeting all your requirements. And they'll say, "Okay, how long does that take? It's going to probably take 6 to 12 months to onboard all your suppliers." Well, now if we can go to them and say, "Hey, we can onboard all your suppliers in a month," it's a much different value prop. So we think there's going to be multiple like impacts of building these onboarding agents. Not only is it going to drive margin, but also we believe it can have a big impact on revenue.

Really interesting. Those initial agentic deployments that you've done, maybe if you could frame how that -- the amount of time savings that you've seen there relative to what a traditional approach would have looked like?

Yes. So on the Web Fulfillment side, I would say it would take on average 1 to 2 days for someone to onboard them. Now that can be done in 15 minutes. And then something that maybe took on the System Automation side, 6 to 9 months, -- now this isn't live yet. We think we can get the 6 to 9 months down to a few weeks. So a pretty dramatic change in the time it takes to onboard. And the customer experience is so much better because what we're doing is what the agent does is it goes out across all the Gong calls and all the conversations sales has had.

It goes through all of the CRM. It goes through all of your -- it knows all your requirements based on the supplier -- based on the retailer you're working with. And so it can do all the configuration with very little input from the customer. And what it will do is say, "Oh, here's the 1 or 2 pieces of information we need from you, we have everything else." And so the customer experience is just much better because they're not sitting on the phone or going back and forth with e-mail with our onboarding agent. So the time it takes them on their end as well, not only is it our time, but it's the customer's time that they have to put forward to do these onboarding as well. And so we think there's a pretty big value prop for our customers there.

It also seems like a faster customer time to value might lend itself to easier cross-sell. I mean, first of all, higher satisfaction, but also you're able to just get them through that process more quickly, get them to value and expose them to some of the new products.

You're exactly right. If you can get -- we're not going to sell you any new products until you're at least onboarded onto the core fulfillment product. And so you're exactly right. The sooner we can get to that motion as well, the better.

Just in terms of the retailer rulebook maintenance, is that maybe thinking through other uses of potential AI. Is the retailer rulebook maintenance -- maybe help us understand -- how large is that in terms of the cost structure? And maybe have you seen any improvements there?

Yes. What I would say there, I think it's one of the huge value -- it's one of our huge sets of proprietary data because only about half of the buying organizations publish the actual requirements. Most of them are unwritten. And only about 1/3 of the changes that they make are actually published. So a lot of the rules that they have are unwritten rules. And so because we've gone about this go-to-market approach where we work with the retailers to drive the supplier compliance, we have access, we get all the information, we get all the data. That itself hasn't dramatically changed.

What we believe agents can help us do is because we have access across the whole network, if we see an issue, for example, with one supplier with Target over here, before we would identify that, it would notify someone on the team and they would go make that configuration change in the network, so then all the other customers get that advantage. That's one big advantage. What if an agent, for example, could identify that on this customer A over here. And then instead of alerting someone on the engineering team to go make this change in the network, it could automatically go through and make that change based on what happened over here. We believe that's where we can get some real advantages to your point on where AI can help, kind of, be more efficient in the way we update the network.

These different initiatives gross margin has already been trending up for the business. Would you attribute any of that to these initiatives yet? Or this is all sort of further upside to come?

No, none of this is hitting our gross margin. Like I said, we did our first agentic onboarding about a month ago. And so this is all probably incremental upside to the margin improvements you've seen. The margin improvement you've seen on the gross margin in the last couple of years has been more fine-tuning all of those manual processes with our customers. One of the biggest friction points, one of the areas of dissatisfaction with our customers is when that onboarding process takes so long. So that team has already been laser-focused on making process improvements there and getting more efficient in the way they do their job. And that's more process people and technology. That's where that historical over the last 12 to 24 months margin improvements come from. None of the stuff I just talked about is built into our margin right now that you see.

On the guidance framework for the rest of the year, I think by our math, you talked about the 1P logo side ending up maybe somewhere flat to slightly up for the year. I think that implies some kind of step-up on the 1P ARPU side. Can you just talk about what do you feel like are the main drivers underpinning that and kind of the durability of ARPU growth going forward?

Yes. I think the biggest thing driving that is the momentum we're seeing within our existing customer base on adding new retailers and the trading partners. So I think last year, we saw a lot of downsells and a lot of pressure when the tariffs came out. Now that we've lapped -- it's been about -- once we get to April, we lapped Liberation Day, we went through all those contracts, we, kind of, rightsized them. What we're seeing from our customers are in a much healthier position. And so what we're seeing, we see them on renewals, we see them adding -- we have more trading partners. They're increasing their document plan.

So we're seeing momentum in that regard. So that's what gives us the most confidence. And then like I said, a lot of the times when we run these retailer programs, yes, we add net new customers. But a lot of the time, we're adding new trading partners to our existing customer base as well, right? So the momentum we're seeing on the retail side, not only is that going to drive more new customers, but it also is a huge expansion lever for us as well. So a combination of the momentum we're seeing on the retail side and then the -- what I would say is the health of our existing customer base and our ability to add more trading partners, starting to cross-sell a little bit of Revenue Recovery, I think the combination of all of those things give us confidence on the ARPU side.

The international story, I think that's something that's kind of come in and out of focus for SPS. Maybe if you could just give us an update on what the progress has been? How does that kind of stack rank in terms of your different initiatives?

Yes. So it's definitely a focus of ours. We're still mostly focused in North America. 91% of our revenue comes from North America. We hired a new European leader late last year. He's done a really good job. We're starting to land our first retail programs over there. It's a little bit different dynamic over there. We haven't really led with the retail programs. What we're trying to do is build out a very similar structure like we do in the U.S. over there. But it's very country specific, right? There's not a lot of -- think about the U.S. market, it's massive and you could have a deck that covers all of the U.S. Well, in Europe, you're going to have -- the retailers are different by country. And so it's a little bit different of a strategy that you have to take over there to build out this kind of retail strategy.

We're starting to see some success. We're seeing success in the U.K. We're seeing some success in Australia. And so I do think there's momentum over there. The new leader there is really strong, and we're starting to figure out what is our local strategy going to be. And then also, we're seeing some momentum on the e-invoicing side. I know we bought a company in that space about 4 or 5 years ago. You've probably seen there's been some new e-invoicing requirements coming out across Europe. Any time these new requirements come out, that's a tailwind for our business because that's something we do. It forces adoption. And so there's a couple of things that we believe are moving in the right direction there. It's not going to be a huge growth driver of the business overall the clears, but it's definitely gaining momentum. And so we feel good about the direction that's going right now. We're happy with the leader that we brought in. And so it's definitely an area that we're focused on. It's just not going to be the biggest driver.

Got it. I want to pause to see if there's any questions in the audience for Joe. Okay. Maybe just on the capital allocation side. You guys have been fairly aggressive with the buyback side. It seems like M&A has -- you haven't undergone anything since Carbon6. Maybe just how you're thinking about the split there between maybe future tuck-ins, further buybacks, organic growth reinvestment.

Yes. I would say right now, we're obviously keeping our eye on M&A. I don't think that's probably the first place we would invest. I think right now, we would continue to buy our stock back. We think that's the best value right now based on where our stock is trading. Now as we go forward, we're constantly monitoring this, right? If things were to change on that front, then obviously, we would look back at M&A. I don't think M&A is off the table forever. I think just right now, that mix right now is more towards buyback versus M&A.

Got it. And then I think we talked through a lot of the components of the margin expansion story that seem really interesting. Maybe you could just talk us through converting that to free cash flow. I think a lot of the guidance framework has been around EBITDA, how do you think about the mechanics there in terms of conversion where that could go?

Yes. So we're focused on that. We actually have a pretty, I would say, pretty good conversion from EBITDA to free cash flow. So that's definitely a focus of us. It's definitely a focus of investors. And so we're always driving towards better free cash flow. I think there's a big opportunity here. I think historically, we've sold more month-to-month than annual contracts. And we have slightly more right now annual versus month-to-month, but I don't think -- we haven't done our pricing and packaging that gave a lot of incentives to buy annual versus monthly. The sales team hasn't been incentivized to sell annual versus monthly. So I do think there's some dynamics in our pricing and packaging. I think there are some dynamics in our sales incentives that you'll see over the next 12 months that can, kind of, I believe, drive even stronger free cash flow and probably close that gap even more between EBITDA and free cash flow. So that's definitely a focus of ours internally.

Okay. We just have a few minutes left here. Maybe if you could just leave investors with some closing thoughts on what gets you most excited about the business going forward?

Yes. I think what gets us most -- gets me most excited a couple of things. One, we've built the biggest managed network in the space. And we believe that the -- with MAX and the agents that we can build that sit on top of that network, we can be the best position to drive efficiency in the supply chain between these large retailers and suppliers. I don't think anyone else in all your do-it-yourself scenarios, you're not going to be able to do that because you don't have the knowledge or the information that we have when you join a network to be able to apply the AI in the same way we do. So we actually think if you wake up 2, 3, 4 years from now, the combination of the margin improvements we're going to get with the internal agents we're building and the way we believe we can apply AI across this managed network, we think we're going to be very well positioned to really kind of grow this business and be the market leader.

Great. Well, we'll leave it there then. Joe, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, everyone else.

Thank you. Thanks, George.

Good day, and welcome to the SPS Commerce Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Irmina Black, Investor Relations for SPS Commerce. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us on SPS Commerce Second Quarter 2026 Conference Call.

We will make certain statements today, including with respect to our expected financial results, go-to-market strategy and efforts designed to increase our traction and penetration with retailers and other customers.

These statements are forward looking and involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please note that these forward-looking statements reflect our opinions only as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to publicly update and revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Please refer to our SEC filings, specifically our Form 10-K as well as our financial results press release for a more detailed description of the risk factors that may affect our results.

These documents are available on our website, sdscommerce.com and at the SEC's website, sec.gov.

In addition, we are providing a historical data sheet for easy reference on the Investor Relations section of our website, spscommerce.com.

During our call today, we will discuss adjusted EBITDA financial measures and non-GAAP income per share. In our press release and our filings with the SEC, each of which is posted on our website, you will find additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations of these measures with comparable GAAP measures.

And with that, I will turn the call over to John.

Thanks, Irmina, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. At SPS Commerce, our foundation has always been our cloud-based supply chain network. .

Today, our network stands as a massive interconnected retail ecosystem of tens of thousands of suppliers and 3,500 buying organizations including all the major retailers and distributors in North America.

We work with more than 2,000 logistics providers and over 400 technology partners which enables us to integrate our network with all of our customers' supply chains and business systems.

We are protocol agnostic and enable fulfillment models and channels with enterprise-grade security certifications. .

That foundation makes everything that follows possible and represents every AI use case on our network. The SPS Commerce network took over 25 years to get to where it is today. Through its effect and scale, we are building partnerships supporting evolving supply chains and helping our customers grow.

Having recently divested the 3P revenue recovery business, we have sharpened focus on strategic relationships with 1P suppliers who operate multi-retailer trading relationships and benefit from our intelligent supply chain and portfolio solutions.

As the network expands, we continue to capture proprietary intelligence from trading partner activity, transaction patterns, digital specifications and compliance rules strengthening the supply chain rules engine that powers MAX, SPS' AI agent.

By leveraging SPS's network intelligence within everyday workflows MAX enables customers to interact with their supply chains in a more intuitive, proactive and connected way.

Users can instantly compare business requirements and business performance between major retailers like Target and Costco with proactive monitoring, MAXes of 24/7 extension of a customer's team, detecting anomalies and flagging critical business errors.

Max puts the expertise of the SBS network at the customer's fingertips to instantly diagnose business issues and determine actionable solutions shortly in the time it takes to address risks in trading partner relationships.

For example, branch furniture is a fast-growing wholesale brand selling to major retailers like Williams-Sonoma, Lumen and Office Depot. They rely on SPS Commerce to manage order flows across multiple channels and have already experienced significant efficiencies using MAX to resolve order issues in minutes as opposed to days from one of their key retail partners, Max helped achieve 90% weekly time savings in managing overdue orders.

Other customers have recognized tangible results since MAX' beta phase launch. MAX successfully cut a $290,000 invoice failure due to an incorrect UPC code.

It identified 100 stalled drop-ship orders for an outdoor brand. It flagged $70,000 in unacknowledged purchase orders for a food manufacturer. Delivering this immediate ROI, MAX is quickly becoming the default starting point for customers inside the SPS user interface.

They trust MAX' proprietary supply chain expertise, and they are increasingly allowing it to take automated actions on their behalf, continually improving operational efficiencies with our trading partners.

By pairing SPS' network intelligence with our Agentic capabilities, with our first AI-powered customer onboarding, including presale context and account provisioning. We're working toward a future where a Gentek technology can engage in new customer immediately after a deal closes, with more of the onboarding processes shifting to AI as we continue to reduce the time it takes for customers to transact with their trading partners.

Agent assisted customer functions and onboarding as well as the identification of our internal operations are the pillars in our agent strategy already in motion at SPS.

We are also exploring new AI-powered use cases and products, which we believe will drive ARPU expansion and increase the size of our addressable market.

The initial launch of MAX to all SPS fulfillment customers is expected by the end of the summer, and we plan to launch additional products at scale later this year.

One of the key learnings from our beta program is that users of MAX through the chat interface are more likely to explore advanced MAX features and we expect this usage trend will define the path to monetization of our AI solutions.

We are excited about these AI capabilities and the immense value they will bring to our network and so are our customers.

In a recent study of SPS customers, we quantified and validated the value and impact SPS delivers to their business. 83% of customers said that the data in the SPS network improved their AI readiness. 87% cited improved scalability and 100% of the surveyed customers said that without the SPS network, they would need more headcount, more tools and more time or in some cases, simply could not operate at the scale they do today.

They see SCS as a strategic partner in navigating increasing supply chain complexity while they expand their business and trading network.

Chosen Foods, a premier food and beverage company, best known as America's 1 avocado oil brand needed a supply chain that could keep pace with growth across their U.S. and Canadian operations.

Over their decade-long relationship with SPS Commerce, they have scaled from trading partner to dozens of customers, multiple 3PLs and a growing supplier network.

To prepare for their next phase of growth, Chosen Foods migrated to a new ERP and trusted SBS to manage the transition. Through a fully integrated Acumatica deployment, SPS Commerce delivered a unified approach across their order to cash procure to pay and revenue recovery workflows ahead of schedule and with 0 operational downtime.

Crucially, with growing deduction complexities across major retailers like Walmart, Amazon and Target, CS' automated dispute management successfully recovered approximately 30% of outstanding deductions, which represents hundreds of thousands of dollars while helping chosen Foods identify why these deductions occurred and how to prevent them. Other customers realizing real ROI from SPS revenue recovery include Alete, a leader in infant health technology recovered $1.4 million within 6 months of using the solution including 100% recovery on our recent settlement totaling $423,000.

Serta Simmons Bedding one of North America's largest bedding manufacturers save $200,000 by successfully challenging a post audit with a large retailer.

Turning to our analytics business. SPS's new analytics solution is now running on a new enhanced platform that delivers significant gains in both power and scale. This new platform brings an improved user experience while enabling faster time to insight so customers can improve -- can move seamlessly from data to decisions.

It expands what's possible for customers, supporting growing data volumes, broader use cases and future AI predictive capabilities.

With these platform enhancements, our analytics solution helps customers protect revenue, margin and shelf space by catching risks early while uncovering new growth opportunities across products, customers, markets and distribution.

It also gives teams the agility and efficiency to act sooner align inventory, forecasting and planning while strengthening retailer relationships with a single view of performance.

Raffles, a children's clothing company based in Texas is leveraging the platform to gain significantly better sell-through visibility into one of the nation's largest retailers capturing critical insights from data across more than 400 retail locations and the retailers' e-commerce channel.

To sustain this momentum, automated data feeds and scheduled reporting will drive ongoing day-to-day analysis.

Early feedback from ruffle but on the platform's granular product and location insights has been highly positive, prompting this supplier to consider adding another major retailer to their reporting.

In summary, SPS' customer success stories demonstrate that navigating today's increasingly complex supply chain requires an intelligent network as businesses continue to expand across technology platforms and connect with new trading partners, they view SPS Commerce as a vital partner for scaling their operations and improving AI readiness.

No other company can match the unique combination of AI capabilities, 25 years of proprietary data deep domain expertise and an expansive network access to drive this kind of tangible value and collaboration that SPS offers today. With that, I'll turn it over to Joe to discuss our financial results.

Thank you, Chad, and welcome, everyone. We reported a strong second quarter of 2026. The SPS Commerce's core business, which excludes an invested 3P revenue recovery business grew in the high single digits, driven by the acceleration of 1P customer ARPU growth resulting from continued upsell and cross-sell momentum. .

On June 30, we announced the sale of the 3P revenue recovery business. We believe this divestiture sharpens our focus on the strategic opportunity with 1P suppliers who operate multi-retailer trading relationships and are positioned to benefit from our intelligent supply chain network and purchase additional solutions like fulfillment, revenue recovery and analytics.

SPS Commerce received a cash payment of $9.5 million at closing, we incurred a loss on sale of $23.5 million in Q2 2026 in connection with the transaction.

Now let's review our Q2 results. Revenue was $197.8 million, a 6% increase over Q2 of last year. Recurring revenue grew 6% year-over-year. As a result of the sale of the 3P revenue recovery business and its approximately 7,300 customers, the total number of recurring revenue customers in Q2 was approximately [ 46,650 ] and an average revenue per customer was 15,100. In Q2, ARPU skewed higher due to the divestiture's impact on our ARPU calculation which used an average of beginning and end of quarter customer counts.

Because the quarter and divestiture significantly reduced our final customer count, Q2 ARPU reflects full period revenue divided by a lower customer base. Adjusted EBITDA increased to $66.6 million, highlighting the health of our business as we scale, strong operational execution, the realization of past investments and benefits of improving process efficiencies.

Turning to liquidity and cash flow. We ended the quarter with total cash and cash equivalents of $173 million. Free cash for the quarter was $57.4 million, bringing our trailing 12-month free cash flow to $198.7 million, up 40% year-over-year.

In Q2 2026, we deployed nearly 90% of free cash flow to repurchase $51.2 million of SPS shares. Now turning to guidance.

As a reminder, as a result of the divestiture of the 3P revenue recovery business on June 30, 2026 guidance factors in a reduction of approximately $10.5 million to revenue to the second half of 2026.

The divestiture is expected to be neutral to adjusted EBITDA in the second half of 2026. For the third quarter of 2026, we expect revenue to be in the range of $196.3 million to $198.3 million.

We expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $67.4 million to $69.4 million. We expect fully diluted earnings per share in the range of $0.72 to $0.76 with fully weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 36.8 million shares. We expect non-GAAP diluted income per share to be in the range of $1.20 to $1.23 with stock-based compensation expense of approximately $16.4 million, depreciation expense of approximately $5.4 million and amortization expense of approximately $8.5 million.

For the full year 2026, we expect revenue to be in the range of $788.4 million to $793.4 million, representing approximately 5% growth over 2025 at the midpoint of the guided range.

Excluding the impact of the divested business, we expect our core business revenue to grow high single digits. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $264.6 million to $269.1 million, reflecting an adjusted EBITDA margin of 34% at the midpoint, an increase of approximately 300 basis points compared to full year 2025.

We expect fully diluted earnings per share to be in the range of $2.24 to $2.33, with fully diluted weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 36.9 million shares.

We expect non-GAAP diluted income per share to be in the range of $4.84 to $4.93 with stock-based compensation expense of approximately $69.8 million, depreciation of approximately $23.4 million and amortization expense for the year of approximately $35.6 million.

For the remainder of the year, on a quarterly basis, investors should model approximately a 30% effective tax rate calculated on GAAP pretax net earnings.

In summary, SPS' strong second quarter performance reflects the strength of our core business driven by upsell and cross-sell momentum. We continue to demonstrate operational rigor, exceeding our margin expansion goals while simultaneously rolling out our AI strategy across our network.

With that, I'd like to open the call to questions.

Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. Our first question today will come from Scott Berg with Needham.

I got a couple of questions. Chad, first of all, I want to talk about the divestiture of the third-party revenue recovery business. you've been pretty positive on the long-term outlook of revenue recovery in general. And I know that part has been a little bit of a store in your side, but why divested, why divested now were obviously a month ago, just help us understand the thought process to move on from that segment.

Yes, Scott. So overall, we remain very confident in revenue recovery. We're seeing the cross-selling to our fulfillment customers be good and also seeing new business come in as a kind of a new emerging category of SaaS solutions, where more of that positivity was though is on the 1P side seller. So that are selling primarily wholesale to multiple retailers, Amazon being one of those, but the 1P sellers really can use our whole portfolio of revenue solutions across multiple retailers, whereas the 3P business was -- those were more Amazon Marketplace sellers there didn't turn out to be a lot of overlap with the other parts of our portfolio for those customers. .

I think that, combined with the take rate revenue model and some of the policy changes in 3P we saw from Amazon. All clearly pointed out that the 1P side of this business is much more attractive for us and has much more overlap with our ideal customer profile than the 3P side does.

Got it. That's helpful. And then, Joe, I think we kind of probably understand the number of customers that are leaving the platform with the divestiture seems to be moving around.

But I guess I got a couple of questions on the ARPU side is one, are you calculating any differently than how the company has before I ask you to comment your revenue in the quarter, but obviously lower customer accounts exiting the quarter. And then I guess, secondly, in conjunction with that, how do we think about the impact going into Q3 because of the revenue step up.

Yes. So we didn't calculate it any differently. And I think because we kept the calculation consistent, it kind of skewed in the quarter. And the reason for that was, if you think about the way the calculation works, Scott, it's the average customer count in the beginning and the ending of the period. .

And so we had those 7,300 3P customers in the beginning customer account, but they weren't in the ending customer count -- and then that's compared against the revenue in the quarter and the full 3P revenue was in the quarter, but not the ending customer accounting.

So because of that, the ARPU overall skewed higher than it normally would have. And so that's just -- it's more of the impact in the quarter going forward, if you think about it, we'll just have 1P customers in the beginning of the end of the period.

And so it will be a little bit more consistent going forward than it has been than it was in Q2.

Awesome. And if I may ask a quick third question here, sorry, on the Medica. Joe, can you quantify what the third-party revenue recovery revenues were in the second half '25? I know you said the business is going to grow the rest of the year excluding that. But any further kind of quantification of that I think would be helpful.

Yes, Scott. So the only other color we're providing on 3P business outside of the fact that your point that outside of the divested business, then we'd be growing high single I think the other thing to call out on the full year is we called out the 10.5% in the second half of the year.

And you can assume the first half of this year was slightly lower than that. So you can kind of get a full run rate of the business for 2026.

And our next question will come from Dylan Becker with William Blair.

This is Jackson Bogle on for Dylan Becker. Maybe sticking on the revenue recovery side, now that the focus is solely on the 1P side of that business, -- how are you thinking about the level of resources and investment dedicated to that business going forward? Is that more -- is there more resources being redeployed toward fulfillment and analytics? Or does the retained 1P opportunity still warrant the incremental investment from here?

Yes. So the -- Jackson, the 1P business, I would say, is nearing consistent with our overall margin profile in the business overall. It wasn't that way right out of the gate with divest with the acquisition of Supply Pike and Carbon 6.

But as that has gotten more integrated into our overall business, it's more approaching our overall margin profile. So I wouldn't say it's an area of our business that is sort of receiving oversized investment at this point in time.

And I think the divestiture of the side of that business really helps us. I mean, because there's quite a bit of good customer overlap product portfolio overlap on the network with the 1P side, and definitely think that revenue recovery business is definitely in line with the margin profile of our overall business.

Got it. Super helpful. And then maybe as a follow-up, with ERP migration is still creating a little bit of timing noise.

I mean I would just be curious get your thoughts if you guys are seeing any change in like onboarding duration, I know you guys talked about the AI enabled customer onboarding.

So is that changing anything with like the customer readiness or attach rates once those projects are complete? Or maybe are there areas where migration delays are building like pent-up expansion demand that could release once these go-lives.

Yes. So we're super excited about the progress around agent onboarding -- we did have in the prepared remarks that we did the first fully agentic onboarding. Now keep in mind, that's with the more kind of simple onboarding that we have that's really taking things that would have been previously done in days and getting them down to kind of minutes.

With the more complex onboarding, which is really where we have all the ERP integrations, we do expect that we will continue to make great progress there. We've been making progress there over the last couple of years, speeding that up. That's led to a better customer experience has also helped us on the gross margin.

And as that was really done all before this Agente capability was applied. So we do expect to speed up those more complex ERP onboardings as well. There's just still a little bit more work to do there.

Once we have that in place, that speed to time on the network can be a barrier for adopting the SPS network. So we think any efficiencies we gain there will help with customers and speed up that access to the network.

I wouldn't necessarily say that there's substantial pent-up demand just kind of waiting for this. Admittedly, the ERP market has been a little bit slower in 2025 and so far this year, especially at the kind of medium to large end of that market.

But I do think our speed of onboarding with agentic ERP onboarding is going to be a massive differentiator for us and really speed up customer time to value.

And our next question will come from Chris Kingdee with Morgan Stanley.

Had, Joe, I think the question and ratings here. I want to hear your thoughts on maybe the macro environment and kind of what you're hearing from your customers? We're hearing about higher fuel costs, higher freight costs, the cape economy. I'm just curious kind of what you're hearing and seeing high level from your customers from a macro perspective.

Yes, Chris, I mean, I would say no substantial headwinds we're hearing from our customers relative to the macro we were coming off a tougher 2025, especially on the supplier side of our network where they did cite some headwinds related to tariffs and that did cause some contract rightsizing last year.

We anticipated that, that would dissipate this year as we kind of did get those contracts rightsized and they were onetime, and that's playing out as we expected.

And so I'd say no overwhelming headwind in the macro, of course, things like the fuel prices and still a little bit of looming tariff uncertainty, things that we continue to monitor. But those things are not coming up in our engagement with customers right now.

Got it. And then maybe, Joe, for you, just on the 1P customer counts. If I have my math right, it seems like that went down around 200 quarter-over-quarter. Is that right? And if so, curious what you're seeing on the community enablement side of things and new customer adds?

Yes. No, that's your calculation there is right. We were down a little over 200 sequentially on customer count. .

The driver of that was really just the timing effect of some of the retail enablement programs Keep in mind, those customers that are typically churning or adding that are primarily affecting that customer count tend to be the real low ARPU customers. That's why we're able to still deliver the financial results, even having that customer count there.

The overall pipeline for an enablement activity right now is strong. There's programs that we're running now that will contribute in the second half, plus the remaining pipeline that's to be closed in the second half looks positive.

That said, I would expect for the year were kind of flat to slightly positive on customer count, but I do expect some of that momentum from the second half enablement programs will carry into early 2027.

And our next question will come from George Kurosawa with Citi.

Okay. Great. Maybe if I could just ask about the MAX beta. You had some interesting anecdotes of customers saving in some cases, it sounds like hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I think you've done some work on market sizing. Maybe you could just share updated thoughts there on how you're thinking about a potential uplift maybe in a best case scenario or for a median customer and then how that maybe has evolved your overall thinking on packaging and pricing as the product portfolio continues to expand.

Yes, absolutely. So yes, as you noted and was in the script, we're seeing customers really identify different supply chain anomalies and disruptions using MAX, which today is through the chat feature, that's what they have access to in the beta.

And using that chat feature, they're able to get to some of those those problems in the supply chain get them resolved, and that's resulting in hard ROI savings for them. What we've seen through the good adoption of chat here, is that a lot of the things that customers are doing via chat would be possible to automate with an agent.

So today, it may take them 20 prompts in the chat to get to the right answer. We're seeing that that's something that actually could be automatic, automatically detected and potentially, in some cases, automatically resolved, which is great because we are developing those types of agents on top of this now.

And we believe that those agents that can do things more autonomously in terms of identifying these anomalies and in many cases, resolving them, not only finds the kind of hard ROI in the supply chain savings, but also is going to be a very favorable kind of headcount and efficiency impact for our customers.

So what we're in the process of now is converting the chat piece from the beta into a general availability, all newly deployed customers as of the last month have been onboarded with MAX included and over the course of the next several weeks here kind of through the summer, we'll be making it available to all our other fulfillment customers and we'll be doing that as part of their standard subscription.

But what we believe the major monetization activity will be is when we deliver those agents on top of that, that are more autonomous and self acting that customers will be willing to pay for that.

And that's really where the monetization would come in. And the way that, that would work is there be certain tiering or bundling of the packaging of those autonomous agents running on top and then we would monetize the customers through subscriptions to those bundles.

But what I'd say is it gives us high confidence in this approach is we're already seeing customers using Max Chat to get to these benefits in their supply chain.

And the things that they're finding and doing, we have high confidence we'll be able to automate with the agentic architecture over the top.

Okay. That's great color. And then 1 for Joe, if I may. Just looking at the change in guidance for the second half. It looks like from what we can tell, on the revenue side, it looks like basically the Q2 beat flowed through, excluding the divestiture impact.

On the EBITDA side, it looks like the full beat was not flowed through. So I wonder if you could just maybe comment if there's anything incremental spend, expense timing, conservatism, anything we should keep in mind on the EBITDA line.

Yes, for sure. I think on the EBITDA side, I think there's a couple of things that we contemplated. One, there was some movement of some of the expenses that moved out of Q2 into Q3 and Q4.

And so that was some of it. I think the other piece is we want to make sure we're being very prudent with the way we're approaching our internal AI costs. As we're building out this stuff for MAX, as we're building out our internal agents on the things we're doing internally, we want to make sure we give ourselves enough room to make those investments and make sure that we've got enough flexibility in the cost structure.

And so that's the other part of that and why we didn't flow all that through the year, George.

Our next question will come from Parker Lane with Stifel.

Chad, you talked about some of the advancements you're making on the analytics side of the house. It sounds like there's a new enhanced platform there. So it's good to see that.

I think the revenue side, it was up maybe 1% in the first half of the year. Can you just talk about what you're seeing from a demand perspective around that? I know you had mentioned that historically, it's been seen as maybe more discretionary, and that was an impact to that business last year.

But looking to the second half of the year, what are your expectations around analytics?

Yes. So we're really excited about this new technology revamp. I mean I do think it will help us on the sales side, some of the previous technology had gotten a little sale a little dated.

Our feedback from customers who are up and running on this new capability is, one, just the look and feel and ability to use the system and the prebuilt capabilities are much stronger than they were before, plus there's more tooling for customers to kind of do more on their own.

And then probably the most important thing in all this is it really changes the underlying data architecture of that product, which now sets it up for many more AI features that we'll be able to add to that over time.

So we are optimistic about that outlook for the Analytics business. I think the fact that it is a little bit more discretionary is true, still, but I think with this replatforming, not only will we be in maybe a little bit stronger competitive position, but we should also be in a position then to add more AI features, which I believe will be able to monetize over time.

Got it. And we're coming up on 2 years in the entry into the first party revenue recovery, space with the supply pike deal. I think at the time, there was about 300 customers that overlapped with SPS -- how have you -- how attach rates or adoption rates trended at the 2-year mark relative to back then?

And what are some of the learnings you guys have had on the go-to-market front and how to effectively cross-sell both both into the historical supply pipe base and back into SBS' base.

Yes. Absolutely. So we've had success in both directions, selling fulfillment to supply pipe customers. Obviously, that's not as big a population.

So it's been a little bit less impactful. But the big win has been selling the supply pipe and really now the Amazon 1P that came out of Carbon to the fulfillment customers.

And we've kind of harden that muscle, I'd say, around cross-selling in the organization. We've done some things organizationally to have that work a little better. We've done some things with the sales teams incentives.

And what I think is really powerful in all this is just the signals we get from the network, right? So the network actually tells us based on trading volumes and trading partner relationships who's the most likely candidate in fulfillment for revenue recovery.

And using that data, we're able to specifically go and target those customers, in some cases, come to them with an estimate even just based on our network data on what the potential is for them to recover.

And I think this is critical for us going forward. I mean we've been clear that we expect to drive a higher proportion of our growth on the ARPU. And of course, there's a big opportunity for more connections for fulfillment customers, but cross-selling our analytics and revenue recovery solutions to those fulfillment customers is key to that ARPU growth as well.

Our next question will come from Matt Van led with Cantor.

I guess following up on some of your comments that about the MAX monetization. I guess curious on what you're kind of baking in, in terms of the adoption cycle for existing customers.

And then when do you plan to have some of these bundles in place and, I guess, early stage, but what are you expecting as sort of the uplift if existing customers plan to adopt whether it's a middle or high tier, like how much uplift can they get on an annual basis?

Yes. Yes. Great question. So in terms of the adoption, I mean, if we were to judge it based on the Max chat adoption, I believe we'll have real strong agent adoption because we're already seeing customers sort of if they're onboarded with Max Chat, it's quickly becoming like the main interface point that they use when using any of our applications. They're just sort of starting in Max chat. .

And through that, then I can -- I believe that as some of the things that they're doing in Max Chat, we're able to automate with agents there will be strong interest in having that all be automated. So they don't even need to interact that much with the chat interface.

They still can, but some of the things that are happening on a daily basis or weekly basis or just get automated with the agents.

In terms of the timing of all that, we expect that we will be in a position to be selling agents kind of by late Q4 of this year.

Now obviously, that will take some time to flow through to revenue, but we do think we'll be in a position where we're actually monetizing this agent architecture still here this year.

Now the kind of the degree to which we're able to kind of do uplift on ARPU. That's some of the details that we're working through right now.

I do think the first set of agents that we put out are going to be probably more addressable for the more highly complex customers with more trading relationships.

And over time, we'll be able to bring that back down to more of our medium and small customers over time.

All right. Helpful. And then, Joe, you mentioned on some of the cost structure of it sounded like internal AI usage.

Maybe just help us with the time line of when internally you were really pushing that aggressively for a good portion of the employee base, just to get a sense for sort of when we might lap that and when growth could provide some operating leverage in the model, whether it's later this year or into next year beyond that?

What I would say there, Matt, is a lot of the leverage we're seeing out of the business right now is not based on some of the AI internal use cases that we're starting to talk about.

I think a lot of the efficiencies you've seen in this business have really been driven by economies of scale, just being more operationally efficient over the last 12 months, people looking internally and making sure we're optimizing each of our processes.

So feel really good about how we've somewhat strictly changed this business going forward without using AI. And if I think of the go forward and some of the things we've talked about, about the onboarding process on the go-to-market side, we believe that those will all be additive to some of the things we've already been able to accomplish without the internal use of AI.

So we feel good about the trajectory of the margin going forward, not only this year but going into next year.

As we exit this year, Matt, we'll have a little bit more color on how we think that probably impacts more of the longer-term focus of the business.

Our next question will come from Mark Chappell with Loop Capital Markets.

Chad, you've had a new Chief Commercial Officer on board now for a couple of quarters. I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about maybe some of the changes that have been made or adjustments that are made to the sales structure, maybe customer segmentation or just even the coverage model for that matter? .

Yes. I would say we did evolve certain things in the go-to-market they were kind of -- happen to be in conjunction with Eduardo's arrival, but I think he's all in line with that.

Some of the things I mentioned earlier around driving a little bit more focus on cross-sell and aligning that as part of our incentive structure also done some things to segment the sales force a little bit more between new and existing.

That has worked effectively, especially on the retail side. And the other thing I would say is Eduardo and his team on our customer success are also responsible for all the customer onboarding activity, and that's an area where we've seen quite a bit of success in are continuing to drive more success as we identify that onboarding process.

So very pleased with the way that Eduardo has come in. He has brought some new ideas to the organization, having worked at some previous very scaled software businesses and just helping us overall mature our capabilities around go-to-market and I will add to part of that is marketing.

We brought in a new Chief Marketing Officer. She's really helped us on some of the demand generation things. I mean the company has been kind of in a luxury position to pretty much solely rely on these retail enablement programs as the source for new customers.

We believe that there over time will be opportunity for -- to drive more new customers through more traditional digital marketing capabilities, and that's something that Maria has brought into our organization.

So the combination is working quite well.

Our next question will come from Jeff Fan Re with Craig Hallum.

This is Daniel on for Jeff Van Re. On the beat this quarter, the last few quarters have been a little bit more in line. Congrats on this quarter, a really nice beat on the top and the bottom.

Just what played out in the quarter that drove the more-than-expected strength here in Q2.

Yes, I think a couple of things. One, we talked about is coming out of Q1. We're not seeing the same amount of pressure, especially on the downsell and gross retention that we saw throughout 2025.

So continues to be a real strength of ours that continues to grow year-over-year and feel really good about the progress we're making on that front.

And then we start to see more momentum within our existing customer base and adding new trading partners. I think we've talked about the land and expand model continues to be a big driver of our growth overall.

And so I think the combination of our ability to expand trading partners within our existing customer base and then the positive momentum on the GRR side were the 2 big drivers on the revenue overperformance.

Okay. And then on the customer count, obviously, that's skewed by the 3P customers exiting the count. But in terms of just the 1P counting down 250 sequentially.

Just thoughts on that, any updated thinking on expectations for customer growth, anything that changed there?

Yes. That was just really due to some timing of the retail enablement programs and how they contributed to customer count in the quarter overall, the retail programs that are up and running, and those are in the pipeline that we have high confidence into the second half that all looks pretty positive.

So I would the second half to contribute sort of a positive customer count but kind of coming in on the year, probably kind of flat to slightly positive on the customer count.

Our next question will come from Lachlan Brown with Roshawn Company.

Had, Joe, thanks for the questions. With your max beta customers, could you just rinse your confidence in being able to convert them when you make MAX generally available at the end of the summer.

Could you talk us through the go-to-market playbook that's in place to transition these accounts at launch? And I guess, any feedback from preliminary customer discussions would be helpful.

Yes. So let me start with the preliminary customer discussions. In this beta. We've been very engaged with customers. I think you can see from some of the detailed examples that we shared in the prepared remarks. We're really engaged with customers, understanding the ROI that they're getting out of MAX. And I'd say this is one of the nice things about having a tool like this.

I mean we see all of their interactions they're able to score their interactions. We have a separate agent that on top of their scoring goes in and scores the interaction. So we really can narrow in and see where customers are getting value out of the Max Chat capability -- in terms of kind of then upselling them from Max chat, which we're using kind of as a gateway into our overall MAX architecture we're going to target those probably larger, more complex customers that have high usage of Max chat -- and utilize -- work with them to convert some of the things they're doing with Max Chat into autonomous agents that we'll just take care of those things automatically for them.

And we think between the ROI that they're driving out of their supply chain and the efficiencies they get then from converting over from chat into an agent and an autonomous agent that there will be pretty high conviction from customers to move over to the more agentic approach, which will be monetizable.

Thanks. And looking at the implied Q4 revenue from the outlook, so just a nice step-up from Q3. Could you just help us on top of the main building blocks behind that acceleration? For example, are there any specific enablement campaigns scheduled for later in the year that gives you that visibility?

Yes, let's walk through a couple of things, and I a talk about it a little bit more on the enablement. I think a couple of things are going on in the business. One, I just talked about it a little bit earlier, the momentum we're seeing on the GRR side. So we continue to see improvements across our customer base.

And so we're in a much better position, I think, going into Q4 and the momentum we're seeing there than we were a year ago. So I think that's the other big driver. And then the second thing is is on the enablement side. We're seeing more of these campaigns come through. We're seeing momentum in the back half of the business.

We have a really strong pipeline. And so we believe there's going to be a solid number of these customers that land in Q4 that's really kind of driving that revenue in the quarter.

Yes. I mean I would just add, although we do -- we see some positivity kind of the big drivers in our revenue performance to finish out the year here are going to be more probably driven by the strong GRR that Joe mentioned in the ARPU expansion. .

We do expect to be positive on the customer count. But the customer count that we drive through these retail programs, certainly, while important, we want to get customers, we want to further penetrate that TAM, tend to be very low ARPU customers when they come in the door. So they are meaningful over the long term, but not as meaningful in the short term to drive revenue.

And our next question will come from Nehal Chokshi with Northland Capital Markets.

Congrats on good quarter. And congrats on the -- as well that the implicit acceleration in the business in the back half, especially in the 4Q here.

And it sounds like it's going to be driven by the improving GRR that you're seeing. Is that -- is the driver of improving GRR MAX? Or is it something else?

Yes. I would say it's a combination of things. I do think a little bit is macro. We did see some headwinds last year in our customer base that drove them to kind of rightsize some contracts. We're not seeing that this year.

The other factor is, I believe, we've made some improvements in our customer treatment strategy. I mentioned that both on the onboarding and also the way that we've organized the sales force to have a little bit more attention, I'd say, to existing customers.

And I think the new innovation that our customers are seeing us with with MAX, with adding revenue recovery to the product portfolio with investing in our analytics product. I think these are all things that show to our customers that they want to be a long-term partner with SPS Commerce.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question will come from Clark Wright with D.A. Davidson.

If we look at the growth mix after the 3P revenue recovery divestiture, how much of the growth now do you expect to come from ARPU expansion versus customer additions?

Yes. Cook, what we've said is kind of in our growth algorithm over the long term, we expect kind of roughly 1/3 of the growth to come from the customer count side and 2/3 to come from ARPU this year, it will obviously probably be slightly more on the ARPU side.

And then if you were -- if you take that to our current expectation for the business to at least high single digits for sort of that low single digits on the customer count and that kind of mid to high on the ARPU growth.

Got it. That's helpful. And then can you help me understand -- in your prepared remarks, you mentioned that SPS Commerce is uniquely positioned to provide agents to automate tasks. .

Can you help me understand why you're uniquely positioned versus other vendors in the market? And what that means going forward as you continue to invest to grow your competitive advantages?

Yes. Yes. So I mean we made that comment in the context of what we're doing in automating collaboration and supply chain transactions between trading partners.

And what we found that is really key to that is the data that we have on the network. So 3 main components there: one, of course, the customers' data on the network.

Often we have more of their supply chain data in our network than they have available to them in the ERP. It's just a broader set of data.

We also see all the kind of macro transaction patterns going across our network. So of course, we can't let 1 customer look at another customer's discrete data, but what we can do is look at trading patterns, especially across the major retailers.

So we may see some differences in the way that Walmart or Target are handling some of their suppliers and see that at a macro level and translate that into some that the suppliers to those retailers need to make? And then maybe most importantly, is over this 25 years of doing this, we have built out very deep proprietary databases of supply chain expectations at the major retailers and distributors in the U.S. have around compliance and supply chain expectations and a lot of this information we have is stuff that's not going to be available in a download of both vendor guide that they're going to provide.

And then a lot of them on the network don't even provide these types of vendor guides and so we're really able to train the agents on this proprietary database, and those agents are really able to guide these suppliers to execute their supply chain in a way that's going to be compliant with their retail and distributor customers.

And I'm showing no further questions in the queue. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation, and have a wonderful day. You may now disconnect your lines at this time.

Good day, and welcome to the SPS Commerce Q1 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the call over to Irmina Blaszczyk. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us on SPS Commerce First Quarter 2026 Conference Call.

We will make certain statements today, including with respect to our expected financial results, go-to-market strategy and efforts designed to increase our traction and penetration with retailers and other customers. These statements are forward-looking and involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially.

Please note that these forward-looking statements reflect our opinions only as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Please refer to our SEC filings, specifically our Form 10-K as well as our financial results press release for a more detailed description of the risk factors that may affect our results. These documents are available on our website, spscommerce.com, and at the SEC's website, sec.gov. In addition, we are providing a historical data sheet for easy reference on the Investor Relations section of our website, spscommerce.com.

During the call today, we will discuss adjusted EBITDA financial measures and non-GAAP income per share. In our press release and our filings with the SEC, each of which is posted on our website, you will find additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations of these measures with comparable GAAP measures.

And with that, I will turn the call over to Chad.

Thanks, Irmina, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. SPS Commerce delivered a solid first quarter. Q1 revenue grew 6% to $192.1 million. Recurring revenue grew 7%, driven by fulfillment growth of 8%. Amid rapidly evolving global supply networks, SPS innovations are critical in addressing trading partner needs across the supply chains of manufacturers, retailers, logistics providers, and brands. Tariffs, geopolitics and risk mitigation are fundamentally restructuring global trade. In this environment, supply chain partners need real-time coordination to respond to disruptions, demand shifts and capacity constraints. And SPS is uniquely positioned to deliver the AI-optimized automation trading partners need at scale.

Before I provide an update on how customers are leveraging our AI-enabled solutions, I'll review current business dynamics across our product portfolio. First, with respect to our revenue recovery business, we continue to manage the headwinds from Amazon's policy changes. For example, to better align pricing with the value we deliver, we are introducing a subscription platform fee to our 3P take rate customers. Joe will be providing further detail. Second, we are pleased with our cross-selling momentum among 1P customers, and I'll share some examples of that shortly. And third, our business without revenue recovery is performing in line with our expectations, with early indications that the invoice scrutiny we observed last year as a result of tariff and macro headwinds is subsiding.

We continue to expect these transitory headwinds will be largely behind us by the end of the second quarter as we remain focused on delivering the solutions our customers need to succeed in a dynamic trade environment. A great example of how suppliers are realizing value from the SPS portfolio is Siete Foods, a customer since 2018. Over the past year, Siete made the transition from a high-growth emerging brand into an enterprise scale operation, driven by their acquisition by PepsiCo and rapid expansion across mass retailers like Walmart, Target, Whole Foods and Costco. As their scale increased, so did the complexity of their supply chain. We worked closely with Siete to modernize their operations and support their goal of full supplier compliance, while integrating tightly with their ERP to ensure they were able to handle higher volumes and evolving retail requirements with greater data consistency across orders, shipments and invoicing workflows.

Recently, Siete became an early adopter of MAX, SPS' AI agent, embedding our proprietary network intelligence directly into day-to-day operations. Their team is using MAX to quickly diagnose issues that previously required manual investigation, such as identifying why shipments failed or invoices were rejected before those issues impact their retail partners. MAX is also helping Siete surface broader operational patterns across thousands of transactions to address the root cause of inefficiencies, enabling them to scale and handle greater order volume with stronger compliance without adding operational overhead.

This customer engagement demonstrates how an SPS partnership evolves beyond trading partner connectivity and compliance to become a core intelligence layer within our customers' supply chains. Siete Foods is one of many brands participating in the MAX beta release, providing valuable insight into how agentic capabilities are being applied and where customers are realizing value across their workflows. For Siete, by catching undetected inventory failures, MAX is projected to protect up to 8% of revenue that would otherwise be lost to stockouts.

Based on feedback from more than 400 MAX beta customers, the biggest impact AI can have on trading partner collaboration is identifying issues early before they cause disruptions. MAX is already demonstrating its ability to do exactly that. SPS is also leveraging agents to improve operational efficiency. Early applications within our agentic network are already driving measurable gains in customer treatment strategies, reinforcing our competitive moat through proprietary network data and intelligence and reducing onboarding and setup time from weeks to days.

In parallel, product engineering has advanced significantly with much of our software development now agent-driven, accelerating innovation cycles and improving productivity. In sales, our data-powered growth strategy is using demand signals from customer activity across our network to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities. As we continue to advance our network-led go-to-market motion, cross-selling momentum continues to build across our customer base. For example, fulfillment customers are expanding into revenue recovery, while revenue recovery customers are adopting fulfillment, reinforcing the strength of our network and the value of our integrated solutions.

Explore Scientific, a precision optics company that designs and manufactures telescopes, binoculars and other scientific instruments, was a supply-side revenue recovery customer. After spending over a year with a different EDI provider during their NetSuite ERP implementation, they faced ongoing usability challenges, unreliable workflows and incomplete automation, at times, requiring manual order processing just to keep pace. More importantly, these inefficiencies created downstream financial impact, with inconsistent data and limited visibility leading to shipment failures, invoice rejections, delayed payments, and revenue loss through deductions and write-offs.

By transitioning to SPS, Explore Scientific reestablished a reliable operational foundation. With a fully functioning ERP integration and standardized workflows across orders, shipments and invoices, they gained consistent, accurate data flowing across their business. This shift enabled their team to move from reactive problem solving to proactive management, identifying issues earlier, understanding root causes and preventing disruptions before they impact financial outcomes. As their operations stabilized, Explore Scientific expanded their use of SPS solutions, adding analytics and system automation to operate with greater confidence and control.

What began as a need to fix operational gaps has evolved into a broader transformation, positioning Explore Scientific not just to process transactions more efficiently, but to actively protect and recover revenue. Explore Scientific's experience highlights how customers are realizing meaningful value on the SPS network by restoring operational stability and visibility.

In addition to cross-selling our products, we are unlocking incremental growth opportunities by unifying them. For example, Walmart suppliers using SPS fulfillment can now recover overages directly in the SPS solution. This underscores the value of the platform approach and enables trading partners to collaborate better along the entire value chain.

In closing, SPS is well-positioned to capitalize on significant growth opportunities ahead. Our product portfolio continues to advance with AI-driven solutions for both suppliers and retailers powered by proprietary data that improves efficiency and unlocks meaningful value across supply chains. As a result, SPS is the leading intelligent supply chain network embedded in the daily flow of commerce, driving automation, insights and increasingly AI-powered optimization.

Lastly, over the past 16 months, we have added seasoned SaaS leaders to the SPS team who bring the operational rigor necessary to scale our product and go-to-market strategy. And today, I am pleased to formally introduce Joe Del Preto as our new CFO. Joe joined us on March 16, and we're excited to have his expertise on board as we enter this next phase of our journey. Welcome, Joe.

Thank you, Chad, for a warm welcome. This is my first earnings call as SPS CFO. I'd like to take the opportunity to express my excitement and share my reasons for joining SPS Commerce at such a pivotal time. First, I believe SPS is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the dynamics that are driving a growing need for supply chain optimization. Second, with a large global market opportunity, disciplined capital allocation and a clear path to scale, SPS is well equipped to deliver durable growth, margin expansion and long-term shareholder value creation. Lastly, and most importantly, having engaged with the management team and many SPS employees, I'm truly impressed by the strength of the organization's culture. I look forward to being part of such an energetic, driven, and highly collaborative team. I share the organization's strong sense of momentum and enthusiasm for the opportunities that lie ahead.

Now let's review our Q1 results. We reported a solid first quarter of 2026. The core business was strong and continued to show momentum throughout the quarter. However, as Chad called out, we continue to see headwinds in the Amazon portion of our revenue recovery business. Revenue was $192.1 million, a 6% increase over Q1 of last year. Recurring revenue grew 7% year-over-year. The total number of recurring revenue customers in Q1 was approximately 54,200. Consistent with our expectations, the number of 1P customers was flat sequentially, while the number of 3P customers declined by 400. ARPU was approximately $13,550.

As Chad mentioned earlier, we're generating cross-selling momentum across our network, and we remain strategically focused on servicing and expanding the 1P customer base, where we see the greatest cross-selling potential for our products. To improve profitability across our smaller customer cohorts, we are in the process of introducing a subscription platform fee to our 3P take rate customers to better align pricing with the value delivered while helping offset servicing and infrastructure costs associated with these accounts. We expect this change to increase churn within this cohort with a projected decline of up to 4,000 3P suppliers in 2026. We do not anticipate this action to result in a material impact to revenue.

Adjusted EBITDA increased to $57.9 million, and we ended the quarter with total cash and cash equivalents of $154 million. In Q1 2026, we deployed nearly 100% of free cash flow to repurchase $47.1 million of SPS shares.

Now turning to guidance. For the second quarter of 2026, we expect revenue to be in the range of $194.5 million to $196.5 million, which represents approximately 4% year-over-year growth at the midpoint of the guided range. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $60.9 million to $62.4 million. We expect fully diluted earnings per share to be in the range of $0.53 to $0.56, with fully diluted weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 37.3 million shares. We expect non-GAAP diluted income per share to be in the range of $1.06 to $1.09, with stock-based compensation expense of approximately $19.0 million, depreciation expense of approximately $5.2 million and amortization expense of approximately $9.4 million.

As we look to the rest of the year, 3 dynamics are shaping our outlook. First, we continue to expect headwinds impacting the Amazon revenue recovery business. Second, excluding Amazon, we expect the revenue recovery business to continue to outpace overall company growth. Third, we expect our business without revenue recovery to continue to perform in line with our expectations. For the full year 2026, we expect revenue to be in the range of $796.0 million to $802.0 million, representing approximately 6% growth over 2025 at the midpoint of the guided range. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $262.8 million to $267.3 million, representing growth of approximately 14% to 16% over 2025.

We expect fully diluted earnings per share to be in the range of $2.66 to $2.69 with fully diluted weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 37.3 million shares. We expect non-GAAP diluted income per share to be in the range of $4.73 to $4.76, with stock-based compensation expense of approximately $69.8 million, depreciation expense of approximately $23.0 million and amortization expense for the year of approximately $37.4 million. For the remainder of the year, on a quarterly basis, investors should model approximately 30% effective tax rate calculated on a GAAP pretax net earnings.

To wrap up, I'm encouraged by our momentum entering the year. I'm excited to be part of this driven team, and I'm committed to maintaining the rigor and discipline necessary to scale our success and fully capitalize on the market opportunity in front of us.

With that, we'd like to open the call to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Scott Berg with Needham & Company.

This is Ian Black on for Scott Berg. When should we expect to see the 3P revenue recovery business start to trough?

Sorry, start to what?

Start to trough.

I can take that question, Ian. This is Joe. I think on the 3P, the way we're kind of explaining a little bit more is the Amazon revenue recovery side of the business. Right now, that continues on a negative trajectory. It probably troughs somewhere in the middle of this year, towards the end of this year. As we enter into 2027, we would probably see a little bit more momentum in that business. But right now, we still see a lot of headwinds in 2026 as it relates to that business.

And then you guys reported some delayed enablement campaigns exiting 2025. What's the progress of those campaigns?

Yes. So overall, our pipeline and activity on the retail relationship management campaigns is quite strong. Some of the specific campaigns that we cited in Q4 that we're going to carry into 2026 have now either closed or are near closure. So that momentum has continued. As these programs sort of affect customer count, keep in mind, there is some delay to actually run the program and get the suppliers on and initiate the invoicing with those suppliers. So we do expect that to affect customer count and be more impactful in the second half of the year versus the first half of the year.

Our next question comes from Parker Lane with Stifel.

Chad, I think you said tariff and macro headwinds that you started to see in the middle of last year should start to dissipate as we lap them this year. Obviously, we've seen more conflict in the Middle East and some talk about what that could mean for global supply chain. Any thoughts on what your customers could be facing or are facing as a result of that? And is there any belief that as you look through the year that, that could have any follow-through effect that maybe knocks that recovery time line off of the 2Q that you outlined?

Yes, absolutely. So we are seeing some of the contract scrutiny driven by the cost pressures from the tariffs from our customers begin to dissipate. You'll remember that most of that took effect beginning the latter half of Q2 last year. So we are cautious in watching sort of how we run through the final renewals that may be more susceptible to that on the annual renewal part of our business. As it relates to the broader kind of global situation, not yet seeing any indicators on that. And as I reflect on this situation versus the tariff situation, we were hearing from our customers more directly that the tariffs were a bit more acute to their business, just immediate impact on their cost of goods sold. And we're not hearing that type of thing from our customers at this point in time, given some of the more global situations that we have out there right now.

Understood. And Joe, maybe one for you. Welcome aboard here, by the way. I think you said about 4,000 third-party customers could churn off the platform as a result of the changes you guys are making. Comparing that to the roughly 7,300 today, what is it about those customers? Is it the smallest of them in nature that would churn off most sensitive to cost? Or is there something else that you would characterize amongst that base that puts them in the category of likely to churn?

Yes. So these are the very smallest of our 3P take rate only Amazon customers. And so they're, for one thing, just not having a high volume of recovery opportunities for us. So they're very, very low revenue customers. And so when we introduced this subscription fee to them, which is quite modest at $19.99 a month, we do -- could find ourselves in some situations with those customers where they periodically process a recovery, but don't feel there's enough volume there to pay a $19.99 per month subscription fee. And that's how we arrived at our churn number. So very -- they're very, very small revenue customers. And in fact, we have a cost to service those customers because they're up on the platform or monitoring their activity, all those things. So we do think that there's some benefit to us from a cost perspective to not service those very low revenue customers if, in fact, they do churn as a result of this platform fee.

Our next question comes from Dylan Becker with William Blair.

Maybe, Chad, starting with you on kind of early takeaways from the MAX program and how customers are kind of implementing it and seeing the value of the network. I guess, just any kind of incremental color you can provide? I know you had a couple of ROI case studies, but maybe also the opportunity outside of the prebuilt agents that you guys are kind of spinning up and offering to clients, maybe the opportunity for those clients to kind of get their hands on it and build their own agents over time, but just kind of how you think about maybe custom-built versus kind of prebuilt deployment over time there as well.

Yes. Great question, Dylan. So let's start with the -- what's happening in the MAX beta. We have 400 customers in the beta now, and the feedback from the customers has been particularly strong. What is interesting is where they're finding a lot of value out of this is when with the tool, they're able to combine their data in our network with the proprietary databases that we have on the major retailers and distributors supply chain expectations for their suppliers. So if you think about the differences that you have in the various rules in terms of shipping an order to a Target or a Walmart or Costco, when you can combine the nuances of some of those rules with your specific data, it allows you to answer questions around, hey, what's the difference for me to acknowledge an order from Target versus the time I need to acknowledge an order from Walmart and how may that affect my workflow.

So it's actually really interesting the things that customers are doing where they're combining these 2 data sources together. And a good example here would be like the one we had in our earnings script called Siete Foods, where they were actually able to use MAX to determine that they had actually more inventory than they -- I'm sorry, less inventory than they believed that they had. It turned out to be some transactions they were doing with one of their supply chain partners, where there were some very detailed things on lot codes and expiration dates that MAX helped them identify and then get their inventory position corrected so that they could make more commitments to sales to their customers. So that's just kind of a hard ROI example where MAX was able to help them with their inventory position and in turn, generate sales.

I think the second part of your question was around kind of customers building agents versus using the agents in the tool. Our approach here is really with the MAX Connect product that we've launched, which is really an MCP endpoint that gives customers access to their network data as well as these proprietary databases that we have around retailer supply chain expectations. We believe that some customers will utilize MAX right within the product itself, but there'll be other situations where the customers will want agent-to-agent interaction. And that's where our MAX Connect product fits in and that is able to handle agent-to-agent communication using MAX Connect.

Fantastic. And maybe for Joe, understand kind of the dynamics on third party, but the core business continuing, it sounds like to kind of track relative to plan. I guess if we think about some of the levers from a margin perspective, we talked historically about gross margin kind of being the biggest one, but it sounds like you have other initiatives underway and kind of maybe improving the unit economics of the third-party piece of the puzzle. I guess, simplistically, how reliant is kind of the 200 basis point target on the growth side of the equation? And how many kind of levers do you have to sustain that trajectory as we kind of navigate through some of these idiosyncratic dynamics?

Yes, Dylan, thanks for the question. What I would say is some of the stuff that Chad was talking about, some of the savings on the 3P side, that's a pretty small probably impact on the EBITDA and our ability to drive the 200 basis points. I think a couple of things -- and you saw this even in Q1, the ability to kind of overperform the guidance we gave. I think there's a couple of levers we have, and Chad mentioned some of this on his prepared remarks related to how we're using AI internally, right? We've seen some really initial success on the time to onboard customers and how much more efficient we can be when we onboard customers internally. He talked about the efficiencies we're seeing on the product engineering side and our ability to iterate much faster.

And so I think what you'll see over the rest of this year as we progress, and there's a huge focus internally on how we can use AI to be more efficient. And that's one of the things I'm really focused on. I think it's -- for me, it's really important as a CFO is working very closely with the IT team on where AI can add the most value internal. And so I do think we're going to -- you're going to end up seeing levers across sales and marketing, R&D and G&A throughout the year. So I think there'll be more to come on future calls on where we're leveraging AI internally to drive margin.

Our next question comes from Chris Quintero with Morgan Stanley.

Chad, Joe, welcome to the call here. I want to ask about the medium-term targets. Obviously, at least high single digits, guiding Q2 to 4% to 5% and totally understand the Amazon headwinds that you're seeing right now. But just curious, is that still the right framework we should be thinking about? And if so, how should we think about the path to getting back to that high single-digit growth rate?

Yes. Yes, Chris, I mean, we do believe that the high single digits over the mid- to long term is the appropriate growth rate for the business. As we both mentioned in the prepared remarks, the headwind is really coming very specifically from this Amazon revenue recovery piece. If you look at the other portions of our business, the revenue recovery without Amazon is growing faster than the overall business. And the business kind of excluding all revenue recovery is really executing per our expectation. So if you take out that headwind, you're definitely back in that high single-digit range, which is consistent with our mid- to long-term expectation for the business.

Yes. And Chris, I'll add a couple more data points there to maybe help you with your question. One, some of the Q2 growth rate, if you think about it sequentially, a lot of that on a year-over-year basis has to do with Q2 this year has the first full year, year-over-year comp for Carbon6. And so I do think that growth rate is probably not directionally where we're headed. If you look at our full year guide and the growth rate there, you kind of do the implied growth rate in Q3 and Q4 to get to the annual guide, you actually see pretty strong re-acceleration of growth in the business.

I think the last thing I'll call out is, and Chad alluded to this, if you remove the Amazon revenue recovery, for example, for our Q1 numbers, you would actually -- the rest of the business is actually already growing in the high single digits. And so I think there's a huge, huge part of our business that is growing in the high single digits. You just can't see it because we're facing these growth headwinds with this Amazon revenue recovery part of our business.

Got it. That's super helpful color and detail there on the core business. Maybe as a follow-up, I wanted to dive a little bit deeper on MAX Connect. we're increasingly hearing that businesses are choosing vendors based on their API strategy and how interoperable they are with broader agents, third-party agents. And so just curious how you're thinking about the openness of MAX Connect and maybe the monetization as agents leverage your network and your data.

Yes, absolutely. So I mean, first, I'd say we have been a very open and API-friendly in our product strategy. In fact, many of the ways our network connects to retailers, especially on the e-commerce and marketplace side is through APIs. So I think sometimes we're a pigeonholed as EDI being the only way we do it, but we're very open, very familiar with the API approaches. And of course, customers have always been able to access our network through APIs specific to the kind of agentic API or kind of more MCP type approach, yes, we think this is very important.

We realize that agent-to-agent workflows are the thing of the future. We're already seeing that inside our business as we deploy internal agents. And we think with that, the data that we have, both the, call it, transactional data, but I will really highlight these databases that we have of retailer and distributor supply chain expectations are very robust. And there are things that we built up over 20 years. Our customers tell us they can't find this information that we have built up over 20 years anywhere else. And that information, we even see it through the MAX beta is becoming very valuable.

And so I think exposing the combination of the network data and these proprietary supply chain databases together are also going to be powerful on the agent-to-agent communication coming through MAX Connect. And we will definitely be monetizing those interactions with MAX Connect over time once we get through this beta period.

Our next question comes from George Kurosawa with Citi.

Joe, look forward to working with you here. Maybe just to start on approach to guidance. This is a few quarters in a row where at least the revenue side has come in towards the lower end of the range. Maybe you could just talk through, has there been any learnings or shift in approach in terms of embedding more conservatism? It sounds like spend is improving. I'm curious if maybe that's something that has not been baked in that could be a source of upside. Just any thoughts there.

Yes. What I would say -- and great to meet you as well, George, and looking forward to working with you as well. What I would say is there's no major change in our guidance philosophy. I think one thing, though, that I want to call out, especially on the annual guide is I kind of mentioned this in my prepared remarks, the Amazon revenue recovery business is really posing a pretty strong headwind for us. And so when we thought about the full year guide, we wanted to make sure that we were factoring all the risks we're seeing in that part of the business. If you were to take that part of the business out, actually, the performance of the rest of the business is in line with our expectations. We actually saw some momentum coming out of Q1 into Q2. So we feel really good about that part of the business.

So I think as it relates to the guidance, I think the only change now is just making sure we're factoring all the risk related to this Amazon revenue recovery. I do think to your point, though, on the EBITDA side, I do think there is going to be upside. We raised the full year guide. We're exploring internally other use cases of AI. But overall, I would say, George, there's not a major change in like guidance philosophy.

Okay. Got it. That's really helpful. And then I did want to double-click on the Amazon revenue recovery. Can you just give us some details on the timing of the rollout of those pricing changes and just the -- maybe the translation of that into churn, just so we can get a sense of that 4,000 customer number, when we expect to see that start to flow into the metrics?

Yes. So we will begin rolling that program out into Q2 and the rollout will go into Q3 a little bit. I do think, though, the churn may happen over time. So we've thought about that even though we're rolling it out in Q2 and early Q3, the churn may come kind of throughout the year.

Our next question comes from Lachlan Brown with Rothschild & Redburn.

Chad, Joe, I appreciate that we're coming up to the cycling of the second quarter '25, where we began to see the lower document volumes within fulfillment. How have these trends been as we exit the first quarter? And just what's the confidence that we'll see strong growth year-on-year in the volume-based component of the business as we head into the coming quarters?

Yes. We definitely haven't seen a dissipation of that headwind related to contract scrutiny, which had customers looking at their document plans and any trading partners that they were able to reduce from their contracts. As we've moved here into 2026, we just haven't seen that same level of pressure that we've seen in '25. And as we've engaged with customers who have future renewals through the year, that does give us more confidence about that dynamic in 2026 versus what was definitely a challenge in 2025.

And with those 400 customers on MAX, how is the consumption usage been through the beta stage? Has that been over or under expectations? And just given you probably have a better understanding of the usage, just has that been helpful in formulating that monetization strategy for MAX?

Yes, absolutely. So first off, I would say the 400 number was above our internal targets. And I think that just speaks to the -- one, the communication of this to our customers, but also them being able to see the benefits to their business of using this even in a beta format. And, like with everything, we've seen some customers where there was really heavy use cases and some of that may -- typically the smaller customers, they're using it, but there's not a ton of volume, just there's not a lot of volume in their business. But all that's going into all of our thinking about how we plan to monetize that.

In fact, our current thinking right now, although we haven't formally come to a conclusion is that we will try to include MAX in a lot of our base subscriptions just to get customers using the feature and then -- but their usage would be throttled somehow. And then based on incremental usage, we have an uptick in their subscriptions based on that incremental usage.

Our next question comes from Joe Vruwink with Baird.

Just on the topic of AI increasing development velocity, you obviously spoke to that and how it's moving forward inside the company. But curious what you're seeing maybe outside the company in terms of suppliers or newer competitors maybe yielding that capability as well. And I'm wondering to what extent maybe AI making automation easier to build could start to remove a supplier or the type of supplier that maybe in the past would look to SPS Commerce to simplify their supply chain complexity and is now maybe thinking of doing that internally?

Yes, Joe, I think it's a good question. I mean what we're seeing is there is still this sort of fundamental difference between a do-it-yourself approach with these connections and being in a proactively managed network like SPS. So the majority of our competitors facilitate a do-it-yourself approach where you do need to go in and manage the connections. Now they do give you good tooling to do that. And more recently, they've given AI tooling to help manage those maps yourself.

But you still do need to manage it yourself, even if you have some level of agents or AI automating that. And we don't believe that for most customers, especially in the small to medium size, which is really the bulk of our customers, that they would ever get the efficiencies from the do-it-yourself approach that they would have in a managed approach. It's a managed network approach where we can make one change that a retailer has and immediately cascades to all our customers just generally leads to a more efficient approach.

The second thing I would say is we're right around the $13,000 average revenue per year for our customers. If a customer is really dedicated to writing out a lot of their enterprise IT stack, I think they're going to go to work on some bigger spend applications before they come down to their $13,000 a year connection to the SPS network. And I think that gives us some protection as well.

Okay. Great. That's helpful. Joe, maybe one for you, just to clear this up. You say the subscription platform change in the Amazon 3P business that's going to yield logo churn, but I think I also heard not a material revenue impact. That's the clarification because the revenue guide is also coming down and it relates to revenue recovery. So are you really saying that there are headwinds, but they're being absorbed in the 1Q, 2Q time frame, and that's really the source of change?

Yes. So Joe, I'll take that one. So kind of two different topics here. I'd say specific to the subscription fee and the churn of those customers, the reason why that's not that material to revenue, although the count in 4,000, the revenue from those 4,000 is quite modest. And for the ones that remain and absorb this platform fee, again, it would be modest, but there's some potential here for even a small revenue uplift there.

So if you kind of net those effects out, that's why we're saying that even with this new policy and the customer churn, there's not a revenue impact there. As it comes to the guide, the guide is really in the reduction in the guide, that's really related to overall headwinds from this Amazon space, which relate to the policy changes that Amazon has made. That's not really -- it relates to the amount of what we can recover for our customers. It's not specific to this introduction of the platform fee.

Our next question comes from Matt VanVliet with Cantor Fitzgerald.

Welcome aboard, Joe. Look forward to working with you again here. I guess when you look at the overall product road map that you had out over the last several months, maybe, how is the ability to get product to market faster using AI tooling in the development area, maybe pulled forward some of those ideas that were on kind of the nice-to-have list, but weren't high enough priority. Where in the business do you think you'll eventually sort of roll out functionality and be able to expand on that $13,000 per year average customer?

Yes, absolutely. So I'd highlight a few different areas that are pretty key to us driving higher ARPU on our customers. So one area would be in the broader revenue recovery business. We continue to execute on our strategy to build out to more retailers. So the more retailers we can support with revenue recovery, the more market that opens up for us there. And so that's been a key part of what we're doing. We're also making a number of enhancements to our analytics product and the underlying technology there and our analytics product to provide some more data access and even AI capabilities within the analytics product, which we're optimistic about.

And then continue to advance our strategies around ERP connections. As an example, we've had a long-standing partnership with NetSuite, making some investments in our NetSuite technology. So customers using NetSuite together with the SPS network can get more full features there. So those would be a few examples of things that are underway in our product road map and have benefited from some of the velocity changes we're experiencing using agentic engineering.

All right. Helpful. And then maybe on the other side of that, how does it sort of raise the bar in terms of an appetite for M&A and maybe what the type of targets you're looking for and ultimately sort of what the outcomes and potential synergies of any future M&A might look like? And Joe, I would love to hear kind of your initial viewpoint on what the M&A strategy might evolve into.

Maybe I'll start first and then Chad can talk about what areas might be interesting. What I would say right now, though, Matt, overall, we're really focused on running the business. And then I think after that, from a capital allocation standpoint, we're focused on buying stock back. And you noticed we bought almost $50 million back, about $47 million in Q1. The Board has authorized up to $300 million in total. And so I think from that standpoint, that's going to be our major focus right now to run the business buy back shares. And then I'll let Chad talk about if we were to get back into M&A, what that might look like or the areas that might be interesting.

Yes. I mean I think Joe is absolutely right. I mean the most efficient use of our capital today is buying back shares. But certainly, over the long term, we view M&A as part of our strategy, really coming from 3 different areas. I mean there's still room to further consolidate in the EDI market. There remain players there. And every time we've added an EDI company, the customers have got more benefit in moving to the SPS network. And those have been very efficient transactions for us, and there's still opportunities out there.

The other area would be broadening our product solutions for our supplier customers as we are driving more and more cross-selling now and that discipline on cross-selling and expanding the ARPU is really getting built into our go-to-market teams. I think we'll have more confidence over time of adding to the product portfolio for those cross-sell opportunities. And activity outside the U.S. has been strong and was strong in 2025 as well. And I think as those businesses outside the U.S. scale, there could be longer-term opportunities to add more scale with acquisitions outside the U.S.

Our next question comes from Jeff Van Rhee with Craig-Hallum Capital Group.

This is Daniel on for Jeff Van Rhee. In regards to the pricing increase for 3P customers, Chad, just the timetable of that, how -- when you came to that conclusion and particularly the degree to which that had already been anticipated in the guidance?

So I'd say overall, I'll answer kind of strategically, and Joe can comment on what was not contemplated in the guidance. So if you look at revenue recovery, if you go all the way back to -- we first entered this with Supply Pike and Supply Pike was 100% subscription business and gave us a broad retailer coverage and a lot in Walmart, but not much in Amazon. We thought there was an opportunity to quickly gain the world's 2 largest retailers in Amazon and Walmart by acquiring Carbon6. The Carbon6 revenue model was more of a take rate model where we just took a portion of what we recovered from customers.

So we've always had these 2 revenue models, and we did have a belief that there are probably portions of the 100% take rate business that we might be able to convert over to a more predictable subscription model or kind of a hybrid model over time. So that's always been a part of our thesis. And so where we decided to start on that was with the very small 3P customers and in particular, those that because they're small in revenue, had some cost to serve question relative to the revenue that we were getting from them. So that's really how that all came about, and I'll defer to Joe on how that was impacted in the guide.

Yes. On the guidance side, I think Chad briefly mentioned this earlier, it's kind of revenue neutral. We believe that there will be some churn and these customers are pretty low value, but I think that will be offset by the customers that do accept the fee. And so I think from a guidance standpoint, you could pretty much assume like a net 0 impact to revenue for the rest of the year.

Okay. That's helpful. And then just for you, Joe, as you're coming on board here, just you could share some of your thoughts on the opportunity you see at SPS to you here? And then any of your top priorities, I know you're early in the seat, but any of your top priorities as you see them stepping into the role?

Yes. I think for me, the things I'm focused on are a couple of things. One, I'm ramping on the business as fast as I can and the industry, right? I want to make sure I have enough understanding to help drive the real strategic business decisions that we need to be making here at SPS. I think the second area is to keep driving the EBITDA that we've seen in this business. They've done a really good job historically driving EBITDA, and I want to make sure we stay on that course. I mentioned this earlier, I think there's real opportunity on the AI front internally to drive leverage, and that will be something I'll be laser-focused on. So those are probably the 2 top priorities for me.

I think at the highest level, to your point, like what are the opportunities? I think Chad has touched on this. The network that we've built between the retailers and suppliers and our ability to use that data and that proprietary data that we have and apply AI against it is a huge opportunity. I know we're very early on the MAX side, but I think there's a lot of upside on where this business can go when you start introducing AI into the product set.

Our next question comes from Mark Schappel with Loop Capital Markets.

Chad, a question for you. There's a new Chief Commercial Officer on board. He is now on board for a little over a quarter now. With the recent expansion of your product portfolio into revenue recovery and AI, maybe you could just talk a little bit about how the commercial team is kind of streamlining the cross-sell motion just to ensure that these products are effectively adopted by your current client base?

Yes, great question. So I would go back and say a lot of the go-to-market motion at SPS historically was focused on acquiring new customers. And as we've established the market-leading position that we have and moved a little bit further in the TAM, there certainly is an opportunity for new customers. But we've been quite open that the larger driver of growth is for us to expand the ARPU with our customers. First and foremost, expanding their total usage of the network. So the majority of these are fulfillment customers where there's still an opportunity to add more connections and features on fulfillment for them to use.

And then secondarily, the cross-sell of revenue recovery and analytics and as we move into the monetization of MAX, obviously, the cross-selling of MAX. So in response to that strategy, I would say both from a sales and marketing standpoint, we focus quite a bit on the engagement with customers and the relationships that we have there, looking after the full customer life cycle and making investments there on customer treatment strategies so that we can retain and grow our customers. And it's not to say there wasn't a track record of doing that, but I think there's just a new operational rigor that Eduardo, together with our new Chief Marketing Officer, Maria, have brought to the organization around those muscles for expansion within existing customers while simultaneously having a very strong motion, especially on the retail side to continue to add new customers.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Nehal Chokshi with Northland Capital Markets.

Yes. Good to see that the guidance implies that on the back half of '26 that there will be an inflection in the overall revenue growth rate. Now given that the core business or, I guess, excluding the Amazon 3P is already growing high single digits. What is the driver for the inflection in the growth rate that is implicitly being projected here?

Yes. So Nehal, I think the right way to think about the dynamics of the business right now is we have an Amazon revenue recovery portion of the business where there is strong headwinds -- that's frankly, reflective of coming in at the lower end of our range this quarter and the reduction in guidance driven by that effect. That effect is based on policy changes that Amazon has made, which have reduced the amount of revenue that we're able to recover on behalf of our customers there.

Then think about the next portion of our business is all of our revenue recovery business, excluding the Amazon. So this is for all the other retailers, Walmart, Target, Lowe's, Home Depot, all of them. This is growing very nicely. We're seeing great cross-selling momentum in this part of the business. And this part of the revenue recovery is growing faster than the overall business, and that was consistent with our strategy when we entered the revenue recovery area.

Then think of kind of our core business or kind of all of our business without revenue recovery, that is growing consistent with our expectations, and we're seeing some positivity in that some of the challenges we saw in 2025 with downsell and contract scrutiny, they are not at the same level in 2026, and our forward visibility on that is quite positive for the balance of 2026.

So as you think about those sort of 3 segments, are you basically saying the core business is inflecting up in growth because you're basically anniversarying the scrutiny in 3Q?

Yes, that's a large effect of why that's there. We're sort of lapping some of the negative effects we had in 2025. It appears that those are more onetime in nature for 2025, and that will lead to a reacceleration in the back half of '26.

And so if the business, excluding the Amazon 3P is already at high single digits, does that then imply that there's -- it's going to inflect further up beyond high single digits in 3Q '26?

Yes. Right now, we're probably not getting into that outside of our guidance, I think that's what we're committed to. And to the extent that we, throughout the year, getting ahead of that guidance, we'll update you. But right now, I would say is that we would stick with the annual guide that we gave you and where the business will come in and then understanding where the current business is outside of the Amazon revenue recovery. But if that changes throughout the year, we'll let you know.

At this time, there are no more questions, and this concludes our question-and-answer session. Thank you for attending today's presentation. The conference has now concluded. You may now disconnect.

All right. We can go ahead and get started here. So thank you, everyone, for joining us here this morning. My name is Chris Quintero. I am the supply chain software analyst here at Morgan Stanley. And I'm really excited to be joined here by the SPS Commerce team. We've got Kim Nelson, CFO; Chad Collins, CEO. Thank you for joining.

Thank you.

Thanks, Chris.

For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative.

So to kick things off, maybe for investors who are less familiar with the SPS Commerce story, give us a quick overview of what you all do, some of your key products, who are your core customers?

Yes, absolutely. So we operate the world's largest intelligent supply chain network with a focus on retail and distribution industries. And so across our network, retailers and all of their suppliers are able to exchange information about their supply chains, usually around the buying and shipping process. And we have 50,000 participants and 300,000 unique connections on our network. And the way that we monetize all that is typically by working with the retailers who will gain us access to all of their suppliers to help them digitize all those connections with their suppliers. We'll monetize the suppliers for use of our network by the number of connections they have on the network as well as the data that flows across that. Then also on top of that network, we have analytics capability where we pull in data from point of sale.

So the actual end location where products are being sold in retail and clean up that data, service that back. That's great for suppliers because it's very important in their supply chain planning to understand exactly what's being sold at the endpoint. And then we have a new category on the network that we built out through a couple of acquisitions and product development over the last couple of years in the area of revenue recovery. So this is the charge-backs if you have a supply chain error or the penalties that retailers will charge their suppliers for those errors.

Oftentimes, those penalties are not legitimate penalties. And so we help our supplier customers get money back from the retailers when they're erroneously charged for penalties in the supply chain.

Awesome. Kim, after 2 decades at SPS Commerce, you're retiring. So congrats on the retirement here. Joe Del Preto who is joining as CFO. So curious from both of your perspectives, what are some of the key financial priorities you're really excited by him taking over? And what is his perspective going to bring into the company?

Yes. Well, I can start with some of the process we went through. So what I would say is very typical with SPS. We do a lot of succession planning. It's a multiyear process. We want to make sure everything is done in a way that is very seamless. So there's also a nice transition. So both Chad and I obviously were heavily involved in the process as well as the Board. And one of the things that really stood out to me with Joe, he is already a public company CFO. He already is -- has a lot of experience and expertise in the SaaS and the software space.

So from the -- I start there because of investors here in the audience, you are in great hands with Joe, and there's actually a ton of overlap even in the banks that cover SPS and cover where his former employer was. I also think that a focus on really that balanced approach, meaning lots of opportunity to continue to grow, huge opportunities still in front of us with the TAM, but we can do that in a way that also is very profitable.

So we drive a lot of cash flow. We also have the opportunity to expand margins. He brings all of that sort of discipline and skill set. And I would say his approach fits in very well with sort of our strategy, our vision, our culture, our environment. And I think it's going to be great to have him added to the ELT for Chad, and I feel like in great hands for what I would call inning 2 for SPS.

Yes. And I think he's well aligned just to this balanced approach that we have of growth and profitability. We're obviously in a strong position to already generate a lot of cash in our business. Lately, we've been able to utilize that for share repurchase as well, which has been great. Joe is very much aligned with this approach. But I'd still say we've committed 200 basis points of EBITDA margin improvement going forward in the business. And so without sacrificing our long-term opportunity, we do think as we scale, there's continued opportunity for margin expansion. We've showed a lot of that through the gross margin. I think that will continue. And Joe is very much aligned with that disciplined and balanced approach that we'll use going forward.

Let's jump right into the AI debate. Clearly, a lot of investors are concerned about the terminal risk value across all of software, and so from the SPS Commerce perspective, curious what's really your competitive moat? What makes you really defensible against some of these risks from AI startups, large language models.

Yes. So I'll just say -- I mean we're super excited. I know the sentiment for software companies isn't that great out there, but we're seeing, day in and day out, both with new capabilities that we're adding to a product like the new MAX agentic capability we built right into the network, and we've got 3 features that are out in beta right now with customers. We think customers are just going to be able to do the things that they have been doing with SPS in a much more efficient way using this agentic technology and will likely unlock a few new use cases through it as well.

We're also really excited about how it's going to affect our internal operations. We are already seeing big strides in the software development process and how we've agentified a lot of steps there. We're moving on to some of our customer relationship management and how we interact with customers and seeing what steps can be agentified there. So I'll just say, like internally, we're very bullish and excited about these technologies.

I think with the disruption story and compared to some other SaaS companies that are out there, we do see a few things that put, we believe, SPS in a strong position. I mean, first, the data that we have on our network. Data drives a lot of these agentic use cases. And we think we're in a strong position there, both by having the customer-specific data and allowing them to access that data through other workflows and MCP access but also the broader network data that we have, which can be very valuable if served up in the appropriate anonymized ways.

The other thing is we're not a seat-based -- we've always been usage-based. So really, the primary drivers of our model have been about how many trading connections you have on the network and how much information you're flowing across the network, which I think is tied more to how customers are getting value from our solutions.

And then finally, I'd say we're not the largest ticket size, either in most IT organizations. Our average revenue per customer is around $12,000 and so if an organization is going to try to write out some of their other IT applications using agentic technology, I don't think SPS Commerce is going to come to the top of that list nor do I think it's an area they want to go after first, right? We're very sticky. We're core -- I mean for most of our customers, this is the main way they get all their orders from the customers. So it's pretty important for them.

Yes. Yes. So it's small ticket size within the broader kind of IT budget department, it's that usage-based model, it's the customer and the network data that you all get.

Absolutely.

You mentioned it a little bit, let's dig into MAX. Some of the new agentic AI capabilities you all have rolled out. I think there's 3 components. So maybe give us a quick overview of what it is and what makes you really excited about it.

Yes. So first, just from a technical architecture perspective, I think it's important we have our underlying network in all the applications that we sell to our customers are connected and riding on this network. So it kind of has become the platform layer, if you will, for SPS Commerce. And that's the level where we've built MAX and built that agentic capability. And then that allows us to serve it up as specific features in the application level. And so the first 3 features we've done are in our fulfillment product.

So the first is MAX Chat and MAX Chat is right in the user interface. So it has context of where you're at in the application and what you're working on and 2 primary pieces of data that are really helpful that MAX operates on. One is the data that you have in the network. So those could be orders, invoices, et cetera. But probably just as importantly, is MAX has access to all our proprietary retail knowledge in the organization.

So this is -- of course, the rule books that are published by the retailers, but we have 20 years of augmenting all of that with all the specific supply chain requirements that retailers have. And MAX knows all about that. So that allows you to do things like go into MAX Chat and say, "Okay, MAX, what is the time I have to acknowledge a Target order versus the time I have to acknowledge a Walmart order?" and MAX will tell you all the rules that are different about that. And then you can say, okay, "given this, go look at all my orders, MAX, and tell me which orders I need to acknowledge in the next 4 hours to be compliant with Target or Walmart." So kind of a simple example there, but if you start seeing how this combination of your data, plus all these proprietary retail rules can work together to execute that workflow. So that's MAX Chat.

And then MAX Monitor is basically a dedicated agent for every connection you have on our network. So an agent that's looking after all of your connections to all of your customers of course, making sure that, that connection is technically up and running and viable, but maybe more importantly, looking for anomalies on that connection. So if you normally get your orders from Walmart that come in on Tuesday, and they have to be shipped on Thursday. And now it's Wednesday, and you haven't received your Walmart orders, that's something that MAX Monitor will pick up on and identify that.

If you usually send all those invoices for those shipments on Thursday afternoon and now it's Friday morning and you haven't invoiced your customers, that's something the MAX Monitor will pick up on.

And then the final feature is called MAX Connect and MAX Connect is an MCP endpoint, which allows for agent-to-agent communication. So because of the data and rulebook and rich information we have, we do realize that we will play a role in workflows across the enterprise that are going to be driven by agents that are not necessarily SPS agents. And we did something cool at the field kickoff we just had a few weeks ago, where we had one of our large ERP partners. We had our MAX and we actually interacted with both of those together via Claude interface. It could have been any LLM, but then that interface was able to go across data that's in our network, data that was in the customer's ERP system and really provide some unique context around both of that.

And so you can see how those agent to agents can execute workflows that are going to be multi enterprise workflows. And then we think that we'll be able to monetize all those interactions over time once we get out of the beta phase.

Yes. Yes. I know it's a bit early, still in beta phase, but curious what's been some of the early customer feedback? And if you thought, how are you going to monetize this?

Yes. So early customer feedback has been extremely positive. We're somewhere between 50 and 100 customers right now that are actively using this in beta form and I think the most important thing is a bunch of those customers have come back and said, "Hey, don't take this away from me." So I think that's a good sign. And in terms of the monetization, we're still working through that. Expect it to be some kind of monetization to pay a fee to gain access to these features and then have that scale based on the usage of those features based on some sort of usage token concept, most likely.

Got it. Let's talk about the retail sector. It's a big part of the customer base that you all serve here. So I'm curious how those industry dynamics have shaped kind of your growth rate over the past few years? And how do you think about that industry dynamic going forward and how it impacts your growth?

Yes. So we have seen some changes in the retail landscape. Obviously, if we go back to the pandemic period, the pandemic was a big acceleration of retailers' omnichannel initiatives as the shops closed, as buy online, pick up in store became more important as there was a global trade situation where people couldn't get access to certain products, there was a diversification of the supplier base, all of which were favorable tailwinds for SPS Commerce. And because of our land and expand strategy, a lot of that carried out through sort of 2023 time frame. More recently, what we've seen is as a result of some of the global trade policies, a lot of the suppliers on the supplier side of our network have had a lot of just general cost scrutiny in their business as their cost of goods sold have gone up from the tariffs. They've looked at other places and then sometimes, they have found that they were potentially oversubscribed to certain elements of the SPS network.

And so in 2025, we did see a little bit more pressure around contract scrutiny, contract reduction from suppliers. We did not see our customer churn change that's always been constant, but a little bit more pressure on those contracts. We're optimistic. We haven't quite lapped that liberation Day, but we are optimistic that through 2025, we did get those contracts rightsized, and there should be some positive effect as we lap some of those effects we saw in 2025.

Got it. That's helpful context. And one of the concerns I hear from investors is that EDI has been around for a while. It seems like you all are already pretty penetrated from a customer perspective, but you all have put out $11 billion, refreshed TAM, only about 25% penetrated per year analysis into that customer opportunity. So curious about that remaining 75% of customers that are out there. What are they using today? And why they have not been SPS Commerce customers so far?

Yes. So I'll share a couple of examples of customer stories that I think illustrate this. So first, on the retail side, in the last couple of earnings calls, we've highlighted the work we've done with Trader Joe's. So everybody knows Trader Joe's, big neighborhood grocery store. We've actually worked with them for a number of years, and they were really focused on the kind of higher-volume suppliers and getting those digitally connected. In more recent times, we went to them and highlighted all the benefits of having all of their supplier community digitally connected.

They agreed with that, and we ran a successful 100% targeting program with them. Now they're also implementing our supply chain performance management. So it just shows there where, yes, they were doing EDI before but not for all of their suppliers and now seeing the benefits. And so we do see that at retailers where -- of course, they're doing EDI, but maybe not with the full tail of their supply chain. And there is a strong business case to get 100% of your suppliers digitally connected.

Conversely, on the supplier side, I was meeting with a customer who had 2 or 3 of their retail trading partner connections with SPS, but did not have all 25 of their retail trading partner connections with SPS. The 2 that they had, they -- we had actually encountered them through one of our retail enablement programs. And as I sat with them and explained the benefits of getting all 25, they started to see that, hey, if they were connected to the SPS network for all 25, they'd have 1 seamless way to get all this order and information in and out of their ERP system and have a consistent internal operation by being connected to the SPS network. So that's the other piece I highlight.

There's still an opportunity within existing customers for up to us to upsell more trading partner connections in the same account because certainly, we have customers where we absolutely have all of their suppliers. We still have other customers where maybe they're going and downloading certain orders from certain retailers from a portal or getting them e-mailed. And so there really is a benefit of just getting all of their trading partners connected via the SPS network.

Yes. So you've been working with some of your long-standing retail relationships for getting all their suppliers on to the SPS network. If we move on to the ARPU side, you all have given out a new growth algorithm, organic high single-digit growth, at least high single-digit growth. Most of that coming from the ARPU side. So curious from your perspective, as you look forward, where do you expect most of that to come from? Is it the cross-sell, document volumes, connections, where is that growth going to come from?

And on that, maybe if we go back to that TAM, so we do have a global $11 billion TAM within the U.S. $6.5 billion. And then if you look at the 2 components of that, on the U.S. side, it's a little less than 150,000 on the customer side, but up to 45,000 on the ARPU. And so that shows you there's a very large opportunity to ARPU. So now to that point on ARPU there's an opportunity once you've landed the customer, there's ways in which we can upsell as well as cross-sell. Historically, upsell has primarily been that go-to-market muscle and motion. So as Chad talked about, we might initially connect with that supplier through a retailer. We get that one connection. But then that supplier has other connections, other retailers they're doing business with. It's an opportunity for us to win those additional connections. That's that upsell motion. We've proven and demonstrated that for 2-plus decades in that opportunity of increasing ARPU. There's still a very large opportunity there. However, we also now have cross-sell opportunities. We have an analytics product and more recently, we have this revenue recovery product.

So what's great about that is those give opportunities to even surround our customers, not just with our core fulfillment but with other ways in which we can help them in other products. So our TAM does take that into account. And some of those, I also think might be a little bit more relevant for more of those medium and larger-sized customers. So it's a smaller quantity of potential customers, but a very meaningful ARPU associated with that.

Right. The retailer-directed solutions from the Traverse Systems acquisition. I've said this multiple times, but I think that's really interesting and kind of you've always worked with retailers for a long time on the go-to-market side, but now kind of providing more products to them directly. So how do you think about building out that retailer solution product portfolio?

Yes. So really with what we got with Traverse, the supply chain performance management, that was the first offering kind of away from EDI connectivity for the retailer and that relationship management service we provide, but it was very logical because the core reason for the retailer to have all these digital connections is to improve the supply chain performance with their suppliers. But what we are finding with engaging with these retailers is, they didn't have good ways of measuring that. And that's exactly what the Traverse -- the product we got from Traverse has done is provide that whole performance management and score carding.

So now we're able to come to the retailer and say, actually, the ultimate thing you're trying to drive here is better supply chain performance from your suppliers. Here's a tool to measure it. And oh, by the way, step #1 in that process is ensuring you have strong digital connections with all of your suppliers. And that's working very well.

Admittedly, it was a big shift in go-to-market for us to combine this more performance and supply chain-based discussion, but things are looking good in that engagement. And I do think that there over time will be an opportunity to have a product portfolio that's around supply chain performance that retailers will be willing to pay for.

Yes. Let's talk about that go-to-market motion. You all talk about those community enablement programs. Maybe give a quick overview of what those are. And then you've also talked about a network-led growth motion more recently. What is that? And how are you kind of leveraging those network signals to drive upsell, cross-sell?

Yes. Sure. So first, on the retail side, we have an offering that we call relationship management for retailers that is really a process where we go through with the retailer to ensure that they have all of their suppliers digitally connected and compliant. And the way that suppliers can do that, of course, is by joining the SPS network, and we ensure their compliance across that network. The other option is that if suppliers have another means we will do a testing and certification process on behalf of the retailer to make sure that there are suppliers that are coming in that aren't on the SPS network are compliant.

And that motion has worked very well for the company for a number of years because every time we run 1 of those programs, those retailers and distributors are giving us their full list of suppliers. And so it's like a built-in lead generation motion for us. And we do expect that, that will continue, both in working with new retailers, but also going to retailers that we've worked with historically and either doing new fulfillment models, which typically introduce new vendors or suppliers into that and establishing what we call ongoing supplier onboarding where we're just baked in to that retailer or supplier onboarding process, and we get access to every new supplier that they bring into their assortment.

Then on the network led growth side, this is really around how do we look inside our network and see our customers' trading activities that gives us signals to what we might be able to upsell them or cross-sell them on next.

Of course, the usage of the network is 1 area where we can monitor that and do monitor that and drive upsell but also looking at our customers and looking at the volume that they're doing with certain retailers where we do offer revenue recovery for those retailers or we do offer analytics for those retailers. And then based on those volumes would lead -- could send us a signal that tells us they're a likely candidate for cross-sell of revenue recovery or analytics.

And then how is that progressing so far? And when do you expect that to really start contributing meaningfully to the results and the top line here?

Yes. So this year, we have put in place incentives and expectations for our fulfillment sellers around cross-selling objectives, both analytics and revenue recovery. And as part of that process, there's tooling that allows them to get those signals that come off the network. Definitely, there is a shift underway at SPS, where we're developing more of the upsell and cross-sell into our sales methodology to drive that ARPU growth where I'd say, more historically, the company has really been driving most of the growth of the retail programs and access to new customers that have come through that. It's not to say that motion stops, but we want to augment that with a stronger upsell and cross-sell motion in the sales force.

Let's talk about recent results. You all called out some macro weakness over the past 3 quarters and the 2026 revenue guidance came in a little bit at the lower end of your target here. So curious if you can unpack what are some of those drivers that led you to that guidance? And what's the path to getting up towards the higher end?

Sure. So when we think about the guidance, it takes into account how we exited '25. And as you know, with subscription business and SaaS models that sort of -- your starting point matters then as it relates to your GAAP revenue for the next year. So we took that into account. And we also acknowledge some of the dynamics or the headwinds that Chad mentioned as it relates to some of the supplier purchase behavior where they might be down selling, et cetera, and some of those sort of macro headwinds and pressures. So we are still lapping some of that. So when you look at our guidance, we provided our expectations for Q1. We also did for the full year.

In order to get to that full year, there is an implied higher growth rate in the back half of the year than the front half of the year, and that is because of the fact that we're still lapping some of those headwinds very simplistically by -- I think about by the end of Q2, we've completed the lapping of those headwinds. So all of that has been taken into account. We do expect continued opportunities to work with retailers on these community enablement campaigns. Those are certainly an important part of our growth, and we see that strong in '26 albeit a little bit later in the year versus the beginning of the year. The cross-sell motion that Chad talked about was revenue recovery now that we have that combined go-to-market engine. All of those things are now in place, and we'll begin to see the benefit of that, but the way the recurring revenue model works, more of that, you will see show up in the GAAP revenue in the latter part of the year.

Yes, second half of the year. Let's talk about Carbon6. You have to bring down your expectations a little bit for that growth in '25. So walk us through the Amazon policy change that impacted you? What led to that kind of lower growth rate? How do you think about that contributing for 2026?

Yes. So Carbon6 was part of our broader strategy to build out this revenue recovery solution for our customers. We heard from customers that they were really having challenges with their charge-backs, how to manage those. And it's a combination of both getting their money back when these charge-backs are erroneous, which is obviously important to them. But maybe more importantly, how do I go from a mysterious code on an invoice that's showing that I didn't get paid for something to understanding the root cause problem in my supply chain. So it's really this combination of get paid when it was erroneous, but maybe more importantly, get better in your supply chain so you can perform better for your retailers and help grow your business with that retailer.

So that's what customers were telling us that led us to investigation of this particular area. We decided to get to market fastest through acquisition, which first was the SupplyPike acquisition, which is really a SaaS platform for managing all these charge-backs. Biggest focus there on Walmart, Target, some of the more brick-and-mortar retailers. We saw that we could further build this out by the Carbon6 acquisition, which gave us deeper penetration in Amazon, but really allowed us to more quickly have that full retailer portfolio. So that's the overall strategy.

Unfortunately, what we saw on the Amazon side was after a really good performance in this business through the first half of last year that we owned it. We saw some policy changes on Amazon side, which reduced the amount of sort of penalties that Amazon was incurring on their sellers, which reduced the amount of revenue that we could recover on behalf of our customers. And the majority of the -- although for some of the other retailers, it's more of a subscription model.

On Amazon, the historic model for Carbon6 was more on a take rate basis. where we recover the revenue for you and we take our portion of that. And in that take-rate model, when the amount you can recover reduces our revenue opportunity reduces. And so we've monitored the situation, tried to set the right expectations going forward. We do think -- we believe strongly in the overall strategy, and we're seeing great demand, both externally, attracting new customers in on this solution. but also from our fulfillment customers and believe the full portfolio of retailer coverage is very differentiated. We are the market leader in this category.

We also do believe that over time, we'll be able to introduce more of a platform fee for those take rate customers as we bring more analytics and insights to help them improve their supply chain.

You talked a little bit there, maybe a platform fee model. But from the customer perspective, I think you are focusing on 1P customers from Carbon6 versus the 3P smaller ones?

Yes. Yes. So there's 2 models to sell on Amazon. One is more the wholesale model or 1P and then the third party or marketplace model. The customers that we have on the 1P side are much more addressable for the other solutions in our product portfolio, including fulfillment. And so we do expect to focus strategically more on that 1P side of Amazon than we will the 3P side, but there's still a sizable amount of revenue on that 3P side.

Got it. let's talk about margins. You talked about it earlier, committing to 2 percentage points of EBITDA margin expansion. I know most of it is going to be coming from the gross margin side. But when you think about sales and marketing, G&A, are there also areas for efficiency and leverage there?

Yes, absolutely. So to your point, Chris, we have a stated goal of driving 2 percentage points of EBITDA margin expansion on an annual basis, and we believe we can do that without jeopardizing anything in the long term just because of the efficiency of our model. In the shorter term, so specific to what you saw in '25 as well as implied in our expectations for '26. More of that will show up in the gross margins. We have a stated goal of, call it, low to mid-70s from a gross margin, we're more at upper 60s currently.

And that's a lot of scaling and growing into various investments we've made historically. Very simplistically put, we don't need the same amount of sort of time and resources to accomplish a great customer experience, the onboarding process, et cetera. So there'll be continued opportunities to leverage that. But to your point, there are opportunities in other line items as well.

The one caveat I would say is R&D. We think our stated goal, we have a sort of 9% to 12% for R&D, we think, is appropriate. There's certainly efficiencies through AI, but we also have a lot we want to do investing back in that customer experience for product offerings, et cetera. So R&D, we're not looking for really moving off of that on the sales and marketing side.

Going back about a decade ago, we were more like upper 30s percent of revenue. We're now in the lower 20s percent of revenue. We think high teens to low 20s is where that will end up. And then on the G&A side, there's certainly opportunities there. We're more on the, call it, mid- to upper teens, and we think that's more on the lower side of that low double digits is where we can get to over time.

So there's lots of ways in which we'll be able to drive EBITDA margin expansion. We have a stated goal of 35% or at least 35%. It doesn't stop at 35%, but that's our -- sort of our next goalpost we're going after.

Got it. Maybe before I open it up for the audience here, on capital allocation. Last year, I think it was about 75%, 76% of free cash flow went into buybacks. How do you think about -- and now you've -- the Board has authorized $300 million in total. So how do you think about capital allocation going forward, buybacks, M&A?

Yes. So if you think about capital allocation, over time, we think the company has effectively deployed capital in both M&A as well as stock buybacks and of course, investing back in the business. If you look at it and where we're currently at, to your point, you saw in '25, we did repurchase more shares than we typically do. We purchased about $115 million or about 75%, 76% of free cash flow.

We did get increase in authorization, to your point, of up to $300 million for stock buyback. In light of where stock price is, that is a very effective use of capital to deploy for shareholder returns as well as based on where the current stock price is. So with that, you may expect to see a little bit more in the form of stock buybacks, but M&A over time, still, we believe, is something that makes sense for us. But in the shorter term, that the deployment of capital and stock buybacks is very appropriate.

Got it. Any questions from the audience here? All right. Maybe last one here to wrap. As you reflect back on 2025, what are some of the key lessons that you're bringing into 2026 in terms of what worked really well and what are some areas to continue to improve upon?

Yes. So if I look at 2025, it was definitely a time period where our customers were under some challenges, I think, primarily driven by the global trade dynamics and we took a long-term view on that. We have a value at SPS, which is win the day, win tomorrow. And I think as we looked at how we were going to work with those customers, the fact that our churn rate was not impacted by that. We did have some headwinds from a little bit of down sell and contract scrutiny, I think gives us a nice base and really being there for our customers during their more challenging period, I think, sets up SPS for success in the long term.

Awesome. It's fantastic. Thank you, Kim. Thank you, Chad.

Thank you.

Thanks, Chris.

Good day, and welcome to the SPS Commerce Q4 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Irmina Blaszczyk, Investor Relations for SPS Commerce. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Kim. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us on SPS Commerce Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Conference Call.

We will make certain statements today, including with respect to our expected financial results, go-to-market strategy and efforts designed to increase our traction and penetration with retailers and other customers. These statements are forward-looking and involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please note that these forward-looking statements reflect our opinions only as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Please refer to our SEC filings, specifically our Form 10-K, as well as our financial results press release for a more detailed description of the risk factors that may affect our results. These documents are available at our website, spscommerce.com and at the SEC's website, sec.gov.

In addition, we are providing a historical data sheet for easy reference on the Investor Relations section of our website, spscommerce.com.

During our call today, we will discuss adjusted EBITDA financial measures and non-GAAP income per share. In our press release and our filings with the SEC, each of which is posted on our website, you will find additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP financial measures including reconciliations of these measures with comparable GAAP measures.

And with that, I will turn the call over to Chad.

Thanks, Irmina, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today.

The fourth quarter of 2025 marks SPS Commerce's 100th consecutive quarter of revenue growth, highlighting the company's pivotal role in driving efficient collaboration among trading partners as omnichannel retail has evolved and supply chains have grown increasingly complex.

We delivered solid fourth quarter and full year results despite a challenging macroeconomic backdrop and tariff-related uncertainty, which contributed to spend scrutiny and delayed purchase decisions throughout the year, and continued to impact our customers in the fourth quarter. For the full year 2025, revenue grew 18% to $751.5 million. Recurring revenue grew 20%, driven by fulfillment growth of 22% year-over-year. SPS's sustained and profitable growth and ongoing expansion of our network demonstrate our success in delivering the products and services that retailers and suppliers depend on to strengthen their collaboration and drive continuous improvement.

In 2025, we acquired Carbon6 to build on the SPS acquisition of Supply Pike in the prior year and extend the reach of our network with clear leadership in revenue recovery solutions. Revenue recovery represents a $750 million addressable market across 1P U.S. sellers and a significant cross-selling opportunity within our network, which we have highlighted throughout the year. For example, All-Star Innovations offers turnkey solutions for taking products from concept to consumer. They have been an SPS fulfillment customer since 2022 and started using the revenue recovery solution last year for several retailers, including Walmart, Target, Home Depot and Amazon.

CyberPower Systems, a global manufacturer of power protection and management solutions, is a long-standing fulfillment customer. To drive further efficiencies across their supply chain, they leveraged revenue recovery for some of their key customers, including Amazon, Walmart and Home Depot, and recently added Amazon Canada.

Other recent examples of customers who are realizing the benefits of revenue recovery include Outdoor Cap, one of the world's leading headwear manufacturing and importing companies; TaylorMade, an American sports equipment manufacturing company; and eos, a beauty and skin care company; and Bunge, a global agribusiness and food company.

Over the years, we expanded our portfolio of solutions through acquisitions and product innovation to support the evolving needs of our growing network, while strengthening long-standing partnerships, many of which have spanned decades. As we're celebrating 100 consecutive quarters of growth, I wanted to highlight a customer who has partnered us with us throughout that journey.

Wolverine Worldwide is a global marketer of branded footwear, apparel and accessories. They began as a fulfillment customer with a single connection and grew within our network by connecting to additional retailers and eventually subscribing to analytics. Building on this long-standing relationship, we recently supported Wolverine's expansion into Europe, resulting in a successful go-live on fulfillment with over 300 trading partners.

Trader Joe's, a national chain of over 600 neighborhood grocery stores, rolled out EDI requirements across the entire vendor base to reduce manual processes, improve order selection efficiencies, reduce shipping errors and prepare for future growth. With SPS's fulfillment solution, Trader Joe's is accelerating progress toward 100% vendor compliance.

Gemplers, a trusted retail brand for farm and home supply products, recently switched to SPS Commerce in an effort to improve order automation and support omnichannel growth. Gemplers opted for SPS's Supply Chain Performance suite and increased EDI compliance from 3 to nearly 100 vendors.

Petco, a pet retailer who operates in over 1,500 locations in the U.S., Mexico and Puerto Rico, leveraged SPS's retailer management solution to transition over 700 suppliers to standardized digital supply chain requirements. As a result, the retailer reduced manual data reconciliation, delivered measurable efficiency gains and improve trading partner performance tracking.

SPS is committed to ongoing innovation to support customers on their journey to modernize their supply chains. We recently introduced our new agentic capabilities embedded into the SPS supply chain network called MAX. Offering new AI functionality, MAX draws on hundreds of thousands of trading connections, decades of expertise, proprietary network intelligence and billions of transactions to help our customers unlock greater value from AI. Put simply, by leveraging the data across our network SPS is competitively positioned to deliver more meaningful and scalable AI enhancements across our product portfolio to better address the trends that are shaping the future of supply chain collaboration.

With that, I'll turn it over to Kim to discuss our financial results.

Thanks, Chad. We reported a solid fourth quarter of 2025. Revenue was $192.7 million, a 13% increase over Q4 of last year and represented our 100th consecutive quarter of revenue growth. Recurring revenue grew 14% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA increased 22% to $60.5 million.

For the year, revenue was $751.5 million, an 18% increase, and recurring revenue grew 20%. The total number of recurring revenue customers was approximately 54,600, as the number of 1P customers was flat sequentially while the number of 3P customers declined by 350.

ARPU for the year increased to approximately 14,350. Adjusted EBITDA grew 24% to $231.4 million. We ended the year with total cash and cash equivalents of $151 million.

In 2025, we deployed 76% of free cash flow to repurchase $115 million of SPS shares. In addition, the Board of Directors approved an increase of $200 million in the current share repurchase program, which came into effect on December 1, 2025, for a total authorization of up to $300 million. This demonstrates our commitment to effectively deploy and return capital to shareholders while maintaining a flexible capital structure.

Now turning to guidance. For the first quarter of 2026, we expect revenue to be in the range of $191.6 million to $193.6 million, which represents approximately 6% year-over-year growth at the midpoint of the guided range. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $55.5 million to $57.5 million. We expect fully diluted earnings per share to be in the range of $0.46 to $0.49, with fully diluted weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 38.2 million shares. We expect non-GAAP diluted income per share to be in the range of $0.95 to $0.99, with stock-based compensation expense of approximately $17.2 million, depreciation expense of approximately $4.5 million and amortization expense of approximately $9.6 million.

For the full year 2026, we expect revenue to be in the range of $798.5 million to $806.9 million, representing approximately 7% growth over 2025 at the midpoint of the guided range. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $261 million to $265.5 million, representing growth of approximately 13% to 15% over 2025. We expect fully diluted earnings per share to be in the range of $2.50 to $2.58, with fully diluted weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 38.4 million shares. We expect non-GAAP diluted income per share to be in the range of $4.42 to $4.50, with stock-based compensation expense of approximately $67.1 million, depreciation expense of approximately $21.6 million and amortization expense for the year of approximately $38.3 million. For the remainder of the year, on a quarterly basis, investors should model approximately a 30% effective tax rate calculated on GAAP pretax net earnings.

I'd like to now turn the call over to Chad for closing remarks.

Thank you, Kim. Before I conclude my prepared remarks, I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge the announcement in our earnings release that Kim Nelson, our Chief Financial Officer, intends to retire after nearly 20 years with the company. Kim has been a steady and trusted leader through some of the most defining chapters of SPS Commerce's journey, from the IPO to our evolution into a global organization that just achieved 100 consecutive quarters of growth. On behalf of the entire SPS team, I want to thank him for her extraordinary contributions and congratulate her on her well-earned retirement.

In addition, I'm pleased to welcome Joseph Del Preto, who will assume the CFO role as of March 16, 2026. Joe brings more than 20 years of experience leading finance, accounting and operational strategy for high-growth, publicly traded-technology companies, most recently serving as Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer of Sprout Social. With a leadership style that upholds our core values, I'm confident Joe will build on the strong foundation Kim created and help guide SPS through our next chapter of growth. Kim will remain at SPS through the transition process to ensure a seamless succession.

Today, we also announced the addition of 2 new independent directors to our Board in a cooperation agreement with Anson Funds, following extensive engagement with a number of our large investors, including Anson. We are excited to welcome Mike back to the Board and appoint Fumbi, who together bring valuable experience that will help us advance our strategy.

As I pause to reflect on the company's achievements to date, I'd like to take a moment to convey my genuine enthusiasm for the opportunity that lies ahead. We recently wrapped up our annual field kickoff event, and I was encouraged to see the sales team so highly energized by our recent launch of AI-enabled products, which we believe competitively position SPS to deliver unparalleled value to our customers. In addition, our reimagined retail go-to-market strategy is enabling more strategic conversations with retailers, initiating new engagements and cross-selling opportunities across our expanded product portfolio.

Our competitive differentiation and inherent growth levers support our revenue growth expectations of at least high single digits without acquisitions beyond 2026. We expect to increase our adjusted EBITDA margin by 2 percentage points annually as we remain committed to steady margin expansion and free cash flow generation to support ongoing share repurchases and drive shareholder value.

Lastly, I'd like to recognize that our success to date and prospects for the future growth are a testament to SPS Commerce employees worldwide. Their dedication and commitment to excellence underscores my conviction in our $11 billion global addressable market in our next chapter of growth.

With that, I'd like to open the call for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Scott Berg with Needham.

Before I get to those, I guess, Kim, it's been a really fun ride. I don't know why now is the right time, look forward to catching up on that later, but just know that you will be missed.

Getting to the quarter here, Kim, you talked about a challenging macro environment that persisted in the fourth quarter. When we look at the numbers, I think we'd all agree to come in maybe a touch weaker, although within guidance and what we are used to and accustomed to. What were some of the challenges in the quarter that might have maybe impacted your expectations relative to where the numbers kind of ended up?

Sure, Scott. So as we established our expectations for Q4 going back a quarter ago, as you can imagine, there were different scenarios or parameters of how that could play out. To your point, on the top line, we ended up at the lower end of our revenue guidance. We ended up at the higher end of our adjusted EBITDA guidance.

So specifically on the revenue side, what we saw in Q4 was a continuation of headwinds that we've spoken about in the past. Some of those headwinds with our existing customers, just more challenging time for them, invoice scrutiny, uncertainty, et cetera. And then specific on the revenue recovery side, we actually -- there's nice demand there, so the demand is strong. However, with the take rate model that we have there, we did see more to the lower end of what our expectation would be, along with the Amazon policy changes that have occurred.

Got it. Helpful there. And then I saw the press release on your new MAX agentic AI solutions there. I guess, how do we think about the opportunity there? Is this some functionality that you think you can monetize on an individual SKU basis? Or does this just kind of enhance your products platform and your competitive positioning relative to other competitors out there?

Yes. So as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, super excited about this new capability that we've launched. So it's really an agentic capability that's built right into the network. So it has access to the network itself, plus all our proprietary information about how retailers work and the requirements that retailers have for their supply chain.

So we've sort of surfaced that capability up initially with 3 new features that are in our fulfillment product. The first feature is really a chat feature, which allows the user to have sort of guided workflows into how they process transactions back and forth with their trading partners, as well as full kind of inquiry capabilities around retailer requirements. As an example, asking what are the different shipment requirements or acknowledgment requirements that are different between Walmart and Target.

The second feature is a monitor capability. So think of this almost just like a dedicated agent for a customer that's monitoring all their transaction activities across our network. If there's any anomalies, like an order didn't come as expected or they didn't send invoice out as expected, that monitor capability is going to catch that for customers.

And then the final feature is allowing agent to agent communication. So we know we have a very rich data source in the SPS network, and it's most likely many of our customers will want to interact with that via agent-agent communication. So we've launched a model protocol interface into the network, and that gives full capability for agent-to-agent communication.

In terms of the monetization, this is initially available to beta customers, and we do have customers that are using it in the beta format, with very good feedback. And as we move through that beta, we're going to monitor the customers' usage of that and help that inform the monetization strategy. I absolutely believe this will be a competitive differentiator that will help us on the competitive side of the business and also help us with retention. But as we get to understand more and more about how customers are using this, I think the monetization opportunities will become more clear as well.

And these first 3 features are just the first 3 areas where we're exposing MAX, because it's built right into the network itself. We fully expect to be exposing MAX across the entire product portfolio over time.

Congratulations on the good quarter.

Our next question comes from Matt Van Vliet with Cantor.

Congrats on the retirement, Kim. I guess as we look forward in terms of reviving growth here to maybe levels you're more expecting, what maybe additional resources or investments do you think can be made and drive sort of above-average returns, maybe even pushing beyond some of the community events? Anything that you're already working on and expect to be rolling out here shortly that can help drive the top line performance?

Sure. Yes. So we do expect that for increasing customer count over time, our unique go-to-market with the retail enablement programs will continue to drive a lot of that. And we continue to invest in that area and refine those approaches there. In addition to that, you may have noticed that we brought on a new Chief Marketing Officer and we're advancing the maturity of our marketing capabilities as a way to, one, attract new customers in ways outside the retail enablement program. So that would be incremental to what we already get with the retail programs, as well as market back to our existing customers, highlighting the broad product portfolio and the opportunity that we have with existing customers, both for the cross-sell opportunity for analytics revenue recovery, but also the further penetration within fulfillment, adding more trading partners.

So 2025 was a tough year in our end market. We did see a lot of challenges. And the main driver our customers were telling us about was global trade. So as we sort of lap some of those effects in 2026, have more of the cross-selling momentum from the products going forward, we expect all these will continue to drive long-term growth for SPS.

All right. Very helpful. And then given the changes at Amazon in particular, is there a thought of maybe pulling back some of the resources for the revenue recovery, maybe waiting to see how that plays out a little more in the market over the next several quarters and sort of reassess from there? Or I guess, what is the approach to thinking about continuing to invest in a business that's been underperforming your expectations?

Yes. So I think what you'll see from us with revenue recovery is we do see strong demand for this product in the market. So in terms of our ability to cross-sell it to our fulfillment customers, and especially the demand that we're seeing from the 1P sellers, which the 1P sellers on Amazon line up much more with our ideal customer profile in our typical fulfillment and analytics customer, that's going well. So I think what you'll see is us continue to invest in that 1P area of the business where it very much fits our strategy, it lines up with our ideal customer profile.

And on the third-party side, not that we won't continue to manage that, and there is demand for that product as well, but probably won't get the same level of total focus as the 1P will. And I think over time, there's probably some opportunities as well in this business to drive the mix a little bit more from the take rate model to the subscription model, but that will come over time.

Our next question comes from Dylan Becker with William Blair.

Kim, I'll add my congrats on the retirement. I'm looking forward to catching up in here on what's next. Maybe for you and also for Chad as well too, but as we think about the broader demand backdrop and what we've talked about in the past as some of those initial projects that were pushed into 2026, I guess, could you give us any update on how those have continued to progress? And maybe what's implied kind of in the outlook for 2026 as it pertains to kind of your expectations on the mix of the net new customer side of the equation? Has that has stepped up in 2025? Has that continued as well as kind of some of the cross-selling efforts that's been an area of more kind of resource [indiscernible] as well too?

Sure, Dylan. I'll take that last one first and then I'll hit your other 2. So we would continue to expect that the majority of the revenue growth is coming from that ARPU side of the equation. That does not mean we will not continue to add customers. Our retail go-to-market, as Chad talked about, is a great way through those relationships -- retailer relationship management programs to get in front of new customers. But the mix between the 2 will continue to be more heavily skewed on the ARPU side.

When we think about some of the dynamics as it relates to the retail relationship campaigns, we still see strong demand for that. What we're seeing, however, is that is probably going to be a bit more, call it, back half versus front half, just the timing of when those are coming in. So still very strong demand, but a bit more later in the year versus earlier in the year.

And then as it relates to just some assumptions in our guidance, you may or may not have picked up, if you think about the Q1 sort of the midpoint is 6% top line growth, for the full year, the midpoint is about 7% of top line growth. We are still lapping some of those headwinds that we've talked about in 2025 across our business. And we really get to a point in the back half of the year where we are then -- that we have lapped those headwinds. So we're still facing some of that -- those -- again, it's the headwinds in the year-over-year compares in the front half of the year that we then have lapped in the back half.

Very helpful. And then maybe for Chad, kind of sticking with the topic of the idea of AI. MAX is obviously a part of it, but it does feel like there's been more of an emphasis on kind of an accelerated product momentum. And we've talked in the past about how you guys can leverage the network to deliver value. Maybe how you're thinking about that innovation cadence kind of ticking up and how that can contribute to a lot of the parts that maybe you guys kind of touched on, but obviously, customer retention, potential pricing power, serving [indiscernible] for kind of incremental customer adoption, but really leaning into more of that AI initiative to help kind of continue to support some of the pipeline momentum that you're seeing?

Yes. Absolutely, Dylan. So what we're hearing from our customers is that data is absolutely key to their AI initiatives. And we're a tremendous source of data. So in our network with our fulfillment product that generates massive amounts of retail and distribution data. Obviously, our analytics business is based on data itself. And so we're just uncovering more and more use cases where we can expose that utilizing agentic capability.

So I mentioned a few that are showing up in fulfillment now. I will also mention that we are doing a major technology replatforming to our analytics product, which really allows that data that's in that analytics product to fit just [ being on ] some more modern technologies in our customers' AI use cases a lot more effectively. And I do think that you'll continue to see innovation from us.

But at the heart of that is really the data that's on the network and the insights that customers can get from that. And it's just with the way the agent technology is moving forward, the speed at which that could come, I mean, it is really moving quickly. Very pleased with what the team has done and the time frame they've done it to get MAX in the market.

Our next question comes from Lachlan Brown with Rothschild & Company Redburn.

Kim, congrats on the excellent tenure as CFO. On M&A, your last transaction was over 12 months ago now. So how is the M&A environment at the moment? Conscious that publicly-traded software has materially derated over the last few months. Are you seeing this reflected at all in private valuations? And how competitive are the bidding process at the moment? Are you seeing much private equity?

Yes. So we continue to manage an M&A pipeline and stay active in that market. What I would say is we also have work remaining as we integrate the revenue recovery business into everything we're doing at SPS Commerce, especially on the go-to-market side. And at this point in time as well, share repurchase is an attractive use of the capital that we have.

So we're just balancing out all of those factors. You will see the Board authorized another $200 million of share repurchase, bringing that total to $300 million that they've authorized. And so that can be a definite attractive use of the tremendous free cash flow that this business generates.

That's clear. And on Mass Connect, which supports MCP and agent-to-agent communication, presumably great for supporting the SPS ecosystem and your customers. But given your moat is the retail network data, how do you manage AI peers taking that strategic data out and using it to their benefit? And also, could you potentially look to price this MCP access?

Yes, I think we will price the MCP access. At our field kickoff event we had last week, we did a live demo for our sales team of this MCP interface that -- where we were connected to 1 of our ERP partners and their agent-to-agent communication. And then we utilized, in this case, it was Claude, it could have been any type of chat-based LLM capability, and actually showing how that Claude was able to connect data out of the SPS network and this particular ERP provider's data, and put that together in a way that was very helpful for many customer use cases.

So I think it just exemplifies that this -- we'll have use cases that are directly interacting with MAX, our agents, but we will also have many use cases where we're just a participant in the customer's agent-to-agent workflow. And I'm confident that our data that we're sort of bringing to that workflow will be valuable enough that we'll be able to monetize over time those types of agent-to-agent communications.

Our next question comes from George Kurosawa with Citi.

Okay. I want to echo congratulations to Kim. I wanted to follow up on the discussion from last quarter about some enablement campaigns that, from a timing perspective, pushed out of Q4 into the first half of '26. I wanted to just follow up on when you expect to execute on those. Just looking at the guide, it seems like possibly maybe some of those are skewing more towards Q2 than Q1. Just any color on that trend.

Yes. So those particular ones that did slip here into 2026 are still moving forward. And some of them are actually kind of running at this point in time. What I would say though is, keep in mind, as those programs affect customer count, there can be a little lag in that, so -- because we actually -- they don't really affect the customer count until we're fully up and running and billing those customers. So those programs are continuing, but I would expect them to drive more customer count in the -- probably the latter stages of Q2 and more in Q3 than they will in the first half of the year.

Okay. That's helpful color. And then on the Q3 -- excuse me, the 3P customers for Carbon6, I think you had guided to about 150 net decline in customers. It seems like it came in a little below that. Maybe just any color on your line of sight to maybe those headwinds normalizing, or how long you expect those to persist for?

Yes. So we really do think about the 1P customer count and the 3P customer count quite differently given the comments I made earlier about just the strategic focus. So you'll see our -- in our results, are flat from a 1P customer count, and then down 350 in the 3P side. As we focus more on the 1P side of revenue recovery, which is really where our ideal customer profile lies -- on the 3P side, the dynamics there are -- our focus is on 1P. We're attracting 1P customers in. Often those 1P customers that we attract are existing customers, right, because of this ideal customer profile. So they're not going to positively impact the customer count. Whereas on the 3P side, these are much smaller businesses, they do have a higher churn rate. And so there is going to be just some natural churn based on the size of the customer there.

So you kind of have this dynamic with a little bit higher churn in 3P, and then 1P, which might not always increment up on the customer count side, but sometimes these are existing SPS customers just taking on the revenue recovery solution. So hopefully, that's a little bit more color on those dynamics on customer count between 1P and 3P.

Our next question comes from Chris Quintero with Morgan Stanley.

Kim, congrats on the well-deserved retirement here. I wish you all the best. I actually wanted to follow up on the enablement campaign commentary. So last quarter, you talked about those moving into the first half of this year and now we're talking about those moving to the second half of the year. So I guess, what gives you the confidence that those will actually commit in the second half of the year versus potentially pushing out again to 2027?

Yes. They're definitely moving forward, Chris. What I was really -- when I mentioned maybe pushing out, it was more about just the timing effects of when we start billing those customers, right? So we kind of need to complete the program. The retailer has to go live and then we kick in with the invoicing. So it's not that the programs themselves are directly getting delayed, but just providing a little outlook that the actual customer count impact may come a little bit later.

Got it. That's helpful, Chad. And then I want to ask about the downsell activity, reducing the number of connections, reducing the number of document volumes. Like how far through we are in terms of how much more downside there is to that action? Or is this something that's going to continue throughout the rest of the year? What's your best guess or expectation around the trajectory of those trends?

Sure. So we started to see some of the downsell activity in Q2 of '25, sort of the latter part of Q2 of '25. So our belief is that we'll have lapped the headwinds by the end of the first half of '26, if that makes sense. So that's basically a full year then of that -- those headwinds. So our belief is in the second half of '26, we've lapped that downsell activity and those headwinds that we've experienced. And we have -- that philosophy we have, that is incorporated into our guidance.

Our next question comes from Parker Lane with Stifel.

This is Matthew Kikkert on for Parker. Kim, congratulations on the retirement as well. My first question, I'm curious what levers are you targeting to pull to achieve the EBITDA margin expansion in 2026? Color there would be helpful.

Yes, happy to answer that. So a lot of it is really a continuation of some of the dynamics that you've seen in '25. So when you think about -- I'll start with gross margin as an example. So you may or may not recall that over a multi, multiyear time period, we've made a lot of investment in the overall customer experience. And all right things to do for customers today and customers in the future. But we got ourselves to a position where we were able to now start seeing some of the benefits of that and drive more of the gross margin and those efficiencies. Simply stated, don't necessarily need to add as many folks as we've had to do historically.

You started to see that, call it, very later part of '24. You saw that through '25, and that continues into '26. So gross margin expansion is a meaningful component of that overall anticipated, call it, 2% of EBITDA margin expansion.

That being said, we do see opportunities in other line items as well, particularly in the sales and marketing as well as G&A side. R&D, we do think our level of spend as a percent of revenue is appropriate. We aren't really looking to get more efficient there in total. But the larger component in '26 of the 2 percentage points of EBITDA margin expansion, you would expect to come through gross margin.

Okay. And then secondly, looking at the delays in the enablement pipeline, are you seeing any bright spots from specific [indiscernible] or different size of vendors, or are the delays pretty much across the board?

I'd say the -- pretty consistent across all the -- we have pretty broad definition of retail, which includes kind of the mass merchant, retail, grocery distribution. It's a pretty consistent behavior across all those. Things food related, there has been some favorable dynamics from some of the food safety activities that have been regulations there. But overall, pretty consistent across.

Our next question comes from Jeff Van Rhee with Craig-Hallum.

Maybe just a couple left for me. As you look at the overall softness in the outlook for the quarter and the forward guide, can you quantify -- maybe and break it down between 2 drivers, one just being the macro/general softening at your customers and the willingness to spend versus the percent that is coming from the revenue recovery dynamics. If you had to allocate the weakness in the guide to those 2 factors, which -- how would you weight that?

So Jeff, what I would say is both of those are important in the numbers. Think of it as how we exited '25 impacts your starting point then in '26. And so that has an impact then, obviously, in your Q1, your beginning of '26. And then implied in our guidance, we are lapping those headwinds. And those headwinds actually are both on what you hit upon there, right? It's rightsizing of some contracts as well as some of the dynamics we've seen on the Amazon policy changes. And we do believe that those headwinds, by the second half of the year, we've sort of lapped that. And so that is implied within our guidance for a slight increase in our overall revenue growth second half of the year.

Okay. And then just maybe secondly, the -- on the pricing front, when you look at individual customers, understanding people have maybe downsized the number of connections, but if you look at the pricing and potential pricing pressure on a per connection basis, is there anything you would call out in terms of the customers maybe getting more price sensitive on a per connection basis?

And kind of along those lines, I remember over the years, periodically, things would pop up about EDI versus more real-time API-based connectivity. Have you seen any shift in the base and thereby pricing pressure accordingly?

Yes. No, if you look at it on a per connection basis, I'd say it's consistent. And when customers are typically downsizing, it's because they have lost that business with a particular retailer or based on the way their cost of goods have changed, they're deciding not to do business in certain ways with certain retailers. So it tends to be driven more from that.

On the API side, in most cases, this isn't a choice how to connect. It tends to be more of the kind of wholesale type connections tend to be EDI if it's more modern; in a marketplace, it tends to be more API. And our network does both. So we support both types. And in fact, when it's API connection, a lot of times, there's potentially more value in that for a customer because those API connections tend to be a little bit more complex than the EDI connections.

And Kim, congrats. It's been just a really exceptional tenure. You've been at class act all the way along. So certainly, I wish you all the best.

Our next question comes from Mark Schappel with Loop Capital.

This is Tim on for Mark. I guess I'll ask around the go-to-market strategy. Given the new CTO that you onboarded, is there any changes that we should expect or anticipate over the coming year?

Yes. We're super excited to have Eduardo on the team. Obviously, he played a pivotal role in our big field kickoff event that we just recently had. I wouldn't say you should expect major changes in the go-to-market. But with this wider product portfolio, the opportunity that we have identified to expand ARPU, definitely more customer practices and things that will help us drive the expansion of that ARPU with the customer is priority in our go-to-market. Not an exclusive priority, but driving that ARPU, I think, will be a key component of our strategy and, therefore, a focus going forward.

Our next question comes from Nehal Chokshi with Northland Capital Markets.

Yes. A couple of questions for me. One is that, I'm pretty sure you addressed it, but just to be perfectly clear, why did the 1P customers be flat Q-to-Q? Because over the prior 2 quarters, that was showing good growth again.

Nehal, I can answer that. We mentioned this on last quarter's earnings call as well. This has to do with the timing of some of those relationship management, formerly known as community enablement programs. So the color we had given a quarter ago was the timing of those, instead of being in Q4, was going to be in the first half of 2026. And as such, we signaled that our expectations were that the 1P customer count would be flat sequentially. And that's -- and basically landed right on with what our expectations were.

Great. Okay. And do you expect the pace of the 1P customer adds to return to what you were seeing in the second quarter and third quarter as we go through calendar '26?

Sure. So the biggest driver as it relates to the 1P customer count is related to the relationship management, again, formerly known as the community enablement program. So the timing of those programs will have an impact in the timing of the customer adds. And so some of the dialogue we've had here on the call is we have a strong community enablement pipeline. More of that, however, will be in, call it, the Q2 to second half of the year, which we still run them throughout the year, but more of those would be later on, closer to the second half of the year.

So at this point in time, we would assume that Q1 '26 would also probably be flat to Q4 '25 due to the timing.

Okay. And then general and administrative, that was up 29% year-over-year for calendar '25, where sales and marketing and R&D were up in the teens. Why is the G&A at such an elevated growth rate right now?

Yes. So when you look at G&A as a percent of revenue, you've seen it be, call it, like 15%, 16-ish percent of revenue. There's various costs in there that you would expect. There has been investments we've been making in some of our back-end tools and technology from both the tools and technology as well as the team, augmenting the team, et cetera. We do have a stated goal of 10% to 15% for G&A over time.

This concludes our question-and-answer session and today's conference call. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

My name is Chris Quintero. I am a software analyst on the U.S. equity research team. And I'm really excited to be joined here by Chad Collins, the CEO of SPS Commerce. Chad, thanks for joining us.

Good to be here, Chris.

Awesome. So Chad, maybe to kick things off, for investors who are not familiar with the SPS Commerce story, where does SPS fit within the broader supply chain software landscape? Maybe who are your customers? And what is the value they're getting from adopting your software and services?

Yes, sure. So at SPS Commerce, we operate the world's largest retail network in the cloud that connects retailers to all their merchandise suppliers. And across our network, they're able to exchange information about the supply chain, generally information about orders, items, inventory and shipments so they can collaborate more effectively. And we have sort of a unique go-to-market where we partner with retailers to digitize all these connections to their suppliers, and we do that through an enablement service. And the benefit to the retailer is they get through that program, 100% of their supply chain digitized. The benefit to SPS Commerce is we gain access to all these suppliers who are in our ideal customer profile and give them the opportunity to join the SPS network. And we're doing this for more traditional retailers, general mass merchant retailers plus grocers, distributors in industrial, food service and medical supply distribution.

Got it. And I'm glad you brought the community enablement go-to-market motion, which I think is pretty unique. So let's double-click on that. How does it exactly work? Is it a direct sales force that goes out to the retailers and engages with them? Tell us a little bit more about the details on that go-to-market.

So most retailers and distributors have some sort of vendor or supplier management department that will handle the onboarding of suppliers. What typically happens, though, is the digital requirements, that team is not -- they're not able to keep on top of that as there's a change in the supplier base, ultimately, some of the suppliers end up you're doing business with them in a noncompliant digital way. And that's the preferred method from a supply chain standpoint. So we offer a service to the retailers where we will come in and manage a program to do all the messaging and communication and outreach to all of the suppliers to get them caught up and make sure that 100% of their suppliers have digital connections.

And then ideally, we stay on and offer a service we call ongoing supplier onboarding, which is just built into their normal vendor onboarding process. Anytime they onboard a new vendor, we handle the digital connection for them. And we have a dedicated retail team that works with large retailers and distributors, primarily in the U.S., and we're starting this up in Europe, and they will offer this service to the retailers.

Got it. And I actually want to go back to your background. So before you joined SPS Commerce, you're the CEO of Korber, another supply chain software company. What were some of the lessons from your time there? And what are some of those that you're implementing at SBS?

Yes. So first and foremost, I mean, I rose up from being a systems implementation consultant actually writing code on projects. So the first and foremost, I mean, my philosophy is you really got to know the customer. You really got to know the customers' problems and challenges. And through that, you will develop the right corporate strategy and the right product going forward. And then specifically, some of the things that I learned at Korber, where we really took a business that I was leading called HighJump in the warehouse management space, primarily a U.S. business. We were able to combine that with a larger European operation that the Korber group had and then go on to do M&A in 8 different countries around the world to really build a global offering.

And that's not exactly the same playbook that we're executing at SPS, but at SPS as we do become a more global company and expand outside of the U.S., really helping the company understand what it takes to truly be a global company, both in terms of the product and service you provide, but also the culture that you need have. I think we definitely are a U.S.-centric and I would even sometimes say Minnesota-centric. We're headquartered in Minnesota, the upper north part of the U.S., which comes with its own culture up there company. And I think as we grow and scale the business over time, we'll much more have to become a global company as we did in my time at Korber.

Yes. So clearly, you spent a lot of time in Minnesota. Maybe taking a step back, let's talk about the industry you all operate within. Electronic data interchange. What does that exactly mean for investors who are not familiar with it? And we've seen the advent of APIs. What does that mean for your business? Is this an opportunity? Is this a risk for SPS?

Yes. So maybe there's a few of us in here who can remember a time before the Internet, but not everybody in the room. So before the Internet existed, there was a desire for businesses to still do business digitally. And in the retail industry, in particular, there was a set of standards that were developed called electronic data interface, really to facilitate the ordering and goods movement information. But there was no Internet to transmit this across like there is today. There was no cloud, right? So there was emergence of a certain set of specifications that developed and a concept of a value-added network, which is a very specialized transport mechanism for these messages.

Well, we are way, way past that now, and we have the cloud, and it's very easy to exchange business-to-business transactions. But one element of this has stuck around, which is the actual structure of those -- of that data transmission, so the actual file formats. And that is what today is referred to as EDI. Even though the vast majority of it passes through the regular Internet as do most B2B transactions, a lot of it still is in the same file format. And so on our network, to us, it does not matter if it's EDI or API. APIs tend to be the more modern way to do this. So example I use is a big retailer in the U.S., Target. All of the customers that we have connected to Target, if they are shipping to a Target store directly or Target distribution center, the structure of that data is EDI. And that's just for historic reasons.

If the customer is also connecting to the Target marketplace, which has been invented more recently, that's on APIs. And our network supports those API connections, and so I often get the question about, is API somehow a threat to your business. To us, it doesn't really matter. And in fact, I'd say if it's an API connection, it actually tends to be a more complex connection and I think really requires or there's a larger benefit for having a network handle that API connection. So I think the more and more we move to API connections, the more value there is in a network like SPS.

Got it. And I wanted to touch on the retail sector dynamics that have occurred over the past few years. Could you walk us through what some of those dynamics have been over the past few years, how they've impacted your customer growth, those customer growth rates during that period?

Yes. So I'll go back to the pandemic time period, which was obviously a challenge in many ways. But for the retail industry, really acted as an accelerant on many retailers' omnichannel initiatives. So as shops were shutting down and there was more driving in e-commerce, you did see the assortments of retailers really increase on the e-commerce side. You also saw the acceleration of these omnichannel initiatives like buy online, pick up in store. All these things required retailers to have tighter collaboration with their suppliers. And so that was a nice tailwind for retail overall, and in particular, for our business.

And as many of you are aware, during that time period as well, there was a nice acceleration of overall IT investments during that time period. We really saw a nice benefit of that of having record customer counts during that time period. And because we have a land-and-expand model, there was a long tail on that for us. So we saw those tailwinds continuing out through 2023 and even into early 2024. In 2024, we saw a bit more stabilization, I would say, of the end market. And we did have a decline in net customer counts over the previous year. In 2024, we came in with customer counts right around 100 or 200. And then we've seen now a reemergence of the customer count here in 2025 in our 1P customers, which are kind of our core customers, that should -- has been about -- it has been 1,250 through the first 3 quarters, so much stronger than last year.

However, we are seeing now much more pressure on the supplier side of our network. And that has been a result of the global trade dynamics, especially for U.S. suppliers. So what we're seeing is the suppliers primarily bearing the burden of increased tariff cost and not passing that on to suppliers or to retailers. And how that's impacted our business is we've just seen a lot more cost scrutiny from the suppliers. The actual customer count churn has remained pretty constant, but we have seen more downsell in these cost pressures from the supplier side of our network, particularly here in 2025.

Got it. More broadly, like how are you thinking about tariffs, the general supply chain uncertainty that we're seeing over the past 12, 18 months impacting the business? You mentioned some downsell pressure on your suppliers. How is that exactly manifested in your pricing model? And is there any positive side for this, too, where maybe some retailers are also looking to expand the number of suppliers that they're working with?

Yes. So rightly or wrongly, we're very flexible in our customer contracts and have always historically favored making the solution very easy to buy. We have primarily small- and medium-sized businesses on the network and their preference by far for buying is to do that with month-to-month contracts. Now the downside of month-to-month contracts is while it's easy to buy on one hand, they are more susceptible to downsell. And so in our pricing model, we primarily scale by how many trading partner connections you have on the network and how many supply chain documents you're sending across those connections.

What we've seen customers that have lower volume trading partner connections or maybe they haven't received an order from a retailer for 4, 5 months under this new level of scrutiny, they're actually turning off those connections where maybe in normal times, they would have kept those connections going, and that's led to some of those downsell dynamics. I'd say maybe more the bear case or the bull case, if you will, on the overall global trade is that if there is a big shift in the sources of supply for retailers or their suppliers on the geographic standpoint, that SPS is very well equipped to help onboard those new suppliers. So we could see a situation in a shifting source of supply where SPS is able to uptick our enablement programs and gain more access to potential customers there. That's not a dynamic we're yet seeing in the business, but I think we'll need to reach a point in time of I won't say full clarity, but maybe more clarity than we have right now before I think that would happen.

Yes. Maybe just to double-click on that. Why do you think you're not seeing that today? And does that have to do the dynamic of where these suppliers are international versus U.S.? How do you kind of think about that?

Yes. So when I talk to our customers who are selling to retailers and have a heavy import aspect to their supply chain, there seems to be a general sentiment that long term, there are certain countries that are probably not great for them to import a lot of products from China in particular. But there's no clear answer on where to go, right, because the dynamic is constantly changing. And so I think what these customers are waiting for is a little bit more stabilization and clarity. And then if they are going to move locations, they will at that time, but don't feel like they have the clarity at this point in time.

Got it. Shifting gears again to the growth algorithm. You all gave a new growth algorithm at your Investor Day, high single digits organic growth. How do you get to that growth rate between customer and ARPU growth? You just talked about some of the dynamics with the customer growth given the retail sector dynamics. So how would you kind of segment those growth algos?

Yes. So the primary driver in our growth algorithm will be ARPU growth. And the reason for that is there's a -- we've identified a tremendous opportunity within our existing customer base. It's always been there, but I'd say we're more focused now to expand the number of trading partners that a customer has on our network. And it kind of makes sense because I described these enablement campaigns before. So most customers when they join our network will come through an enablement campaign. They'll add a connection for that one particular retailer. And then it's really our team's responsibility to expand the use of the network across all their customers.

So if we can increase that rate at which those additional trading partner connections are being added, that would increase the velocity of growth and expand that ARPU beyond what it is today. And then the other aspect of the ARPU growth would be the broader product portfolio we have, in particular, the revenue recovery product category that we built out via a couple of acquisitions we did last year. And that is a great cross-selling opportunity us for a number of our -- especially medium and large-sized customers. The customer count side, we do expect to continue to grow. But in proportion to the opportunity we have in ARPU, we'd expect more of the growth to be coming on the ARPU side versus the count side.

Yes. So in order to drive that ARPU growth, you recently announced a new network-led growth motion, which I think gets at that point of trying to drive greater cross-sell across your network of customers. So maybe give us a quick overview of like what that go-to-market motion is and how you're leveraging the large network you all have.

Yes. So this concept of network-led growth is really all about identifying from our network itself, additional opportunities for customers to buy from us. So let's use a couple of examples. I'm more familiar with U.S. retailers, so I'll just use those. We have Lowe's and Home Depot. So these are rival home improvement stores, big chains in the U.S. Well, we know that many of our customers who trade with Home Depot also trade with Lowe's. And so if we could identify customers who are trading with one and not the other, there's a high probability that presents an upsell opportunity for the other trading partner.

And we can glean these things from our network and then we can automate that through agents and serve those up as sales opportunities for our sales force. Similarly, with revenue recovery, we know that if you're trading at a certain volume with one of the retailers where we support revenue recovery and based on your shipment volume, that you're a high likely candidate for revenue recovery and there should be a strong ROI there. And we do both of these things based on just the data we have in our and really applying insights and in many cases, AI agents to go discover these and then serve these up as additional sales opportunities for our sales force.

Got it. Let's touch on that, the M&A to build out this revenue recovery business. Give us an overview of what that product portfolio really is and what were the assets that you ended up buying here to bring that into the portfolio?

Yes. So just to start with the business problem. If you're a supplier to retail and these retailers have very strict guidelines on how their supply chain needs to work as well as the digital transaction requirements that there with the supply chain. So if you make a mistake in that supply chain, you ship to them too late, you ship them too little, you ship them too much, your product is damaged, if it's not labeled correctly, all these things will result in a supply chain penalty. And the way that penalty is levied is they just deduct that amount from your invoice with a very cryptic code that says what the chargeback reason is.

Well, there's a big problem for suppliers to retailers. I mean, first, they want to understand what it is, so they can fix the problem in their supply chain. Also, 10% of these chargebacks are mistakes that happen on the retailer system side and you can actually get recovered for. So if you said you shipped 100 widgets, the retailer said they received 90 and is charging you a penalty for the other 10, but you can prove you actually shipped 100, then you can go get that penalty recovered. And so we saw this problem in our customer base, and we thought the fastest way to address this problem was to acquire 2 of the leading emerging SaaS platforms that address this problem, really taking this from a manual back and forth between suppliers and retailers to a SaaS platform. And so we acquired SupplyPike, which covered most of the major brick-and-mortar retailers in the U.S. and then Carbon6, which provided this type of solution for Amazon on both the 1P seller side and the 3P seller side.

We've put those businesses together now. We have one sales force that's out there selling that for all the retailers we cover and selling it on a couple of different models. The first model is you can run your own recovery process. So you have your own people, you'll pay us a subscription fee and use our platform to manage that back and forth with the retailer on the recovery. Or if you don't have your own people, we'll provide that more on a white glove service basis, and we'll actually manage your recoveries on your behalf. And in that model, we'll just take a portion of the money that's recovered as our take rate on that -- providing that service.

Got it. And one of the other acquisitions you made was Traverse Systems, which I think is really interesting because that product you're actually selling to retailers versus the suppliers have been historically your main customer here. So talk to us a bit about -- and you've also rebranded it to Retailer Solutions. So talk to us a bit about what that product portfolio offers retailers? And could this be an area that you further go into as you sell more solutions to retailers here?

Yes. So we've always been really good when we work with retailers about getting all these digital connections established. I would say what we haven't historically been so great at is providing a scorecard around how that particular supplier is performing from a supply chain standpoint. And that's really the technology that we got with the Traverse Systems acquisition is a capability that we can offer to retailers that does all the scorecarding of the supply chain performance of their suppliers, and so now when we go into a retailer, we're able to have a discussion more about supply chain performance and metrics and driving improvement.

Of course, a foundational aspect to that is getting all the digital connections in place with your suppliers, but it's really elevated the discussion that we're able to have with executives at retailers by combining the asset we got from Traverse Systems with the service that we've always provided for these enablement programs.

Got it. I wanted to touch on the TAM. You guys put out a refreshed TAM, $11 billion globally, generally about 25% penetrated across your small, medium and large customer bases. What is the other 75% of the market doing today? Are they using another EDI vendor? Are they doing something in-house? What are they currently doing?

Yes. So the vast majority of that unpenetrated TAM by us is undigitized connections. So this is still, hey, I have an order, I'm going to place that order. I'm going to send it to you electronically and e-mail. You're going to e-mail me back and confirm the order. I'm never going to get any information about the exact date or exact quantity. I'm not going to send you an advanced shipment notice that tells you what's coming to your distribution center. And you would be surprised how many undigitized connections are still out there. And then there's a portion that is served. And that portion that's served kind of comes in 2 categories. There is a number of larger technology providers that offer more of a do-it-yourself model.

So we see IBM and their Sterling product line in this area, also a number of products that come from OpenText. And they're going to provide you the tooling, but you're going to have to manage all your individual connections with all your retail partners. And if they change the rules, you got to go into that tool and change it for every retailer. We also see at the small end, a handful of smaller providers that are offering this type of solution either around a particular industry segment or a particular ERP system. What we don't see is anybody offering this broad network approach, whereas if you join the network once, we ensure your compliance to all your retail partners. And we also aren't seeing anybody penetrate this TAM the way that we are by running these enablement programs. That's been something that we've been working on for 20 years. I think we perfected it, and I think it's been really hard for the competition to replicate.

Yes, you brought up competition there. So at the Investor Day, you shared that only about 2% of the time you're losing to direct competitors. And 28% of the time is actually the prospect just makes no change in their decision. So on the direct competition front, who are some of those competitors? And why do you win? And on the no change front, why does the prospect not make any change? And what can you do to help make those SPS Commerce customers?

Yes. So it's clear on the high end of the market, we have these kind of do-it-yourself type approaches. That was the only approach for larger companies. say, even 10 years ago when SPS was much more focused on small to medium businesses. I'm confident we'll get at bats for those opportunities as these companies move through the replacement cycle, their legacy tech and some of the people that were the EDI specialists that they hired many years ago, get new jobs or retire, we'll get those at-bats. Then at the low end of the market, we do have the most compelling technology and the broadest network. We are premium price.

So for those customers that see the value in our network, they're willing to pay for it. But it's a very price-sensitive market, especially in the small customer area, and that is an opportunity for some of our small customers. But as our metrics say we're winning the vast majority of the time. Where customers would usually opt to do nothing, I'd say that's often tied to them in their ERP replacement cycle. So we often will have a gain a new customer at the time that they change out their ERP. And in those situations, those ERP changes are big decisions and sometimes they get delayed and pushed out, and that just happens from time to time.

Got it. I've got a bunch more questions, but I wanted to open it up to the audience if anyone has any questions. All right. Maybe to end things off here, Chad, what do you think investors underappreciate about the SPS Commerce story? Where should they really be digging into here?

Yes. I think, one, the TAM that you brought up. I mean, we are confident in the long-term opportunity. And I think the question is what will be the market conditions that dictate the pace at which we're able to tackle that and penetrate that total TAM. I think the size and scale of our network is sometimes underappreciated in how great opportunity that can be and the future potential that we have over the longer term outside the United States.

Awesome. Well, thanks, Chad. Really appreciate the time today.

Good day, and welcome to the SPS Commerce Q3 2025 Earnings Conference Call.[Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Irmina Blaszczyk, Investor Relations for SPS Commerce. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Dave. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us on SPS Commerce Third Quarter 2025 Conference Call. We will make certain statements today, including with respect to our expected financial results, go-to-market strategy and efforts designed to increase our traction and penetration with retailers and other customers. These statements are forward-looking and involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially.

Please note that these forward-looking statements reflect our opinions only as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Please refer to our SEC filings, specifically our Form 10-K as well as our financial results press release for a more detailed description of the risk factors that may affect our results. These documents are available at our website, spscommerce.com, and at the SEC's website, sec.gov.

In addition, we are providing a historical data sheet for easy reference on the Investor Relations section of our website, spscommerce.com. During our call today, we will discuss adjusted EBITDA financial measures and non-GAAP income per share. In our press release and our filings with the SEC, each of which is posted on our website, you will find additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations of these measures with comparable GAAP measures. And with that, I will turn the call over to Chad.

Thanks, Irmina, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. SPS Commerce delivered solid third quarter results across our core business despite ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty and continued spend scrutiny. Third quarter revenue grew 16% to $189.9 million and recurring revenue grew 18%. Our fulfillment business grew 20% year-over-year. The net increase of 450 customers exceeded our expectations in the quarter, primarily driven by strong retail relationship management programs.

I'd like to take a moment to review the key dynamics that impacted our revenue recovery business, which came in approximately $3 million below our expectations in Q3. Firstly, we now recognize that there is more seasonality in this business than we had originally anticipated. In Q2, for example, we benefited from a higher-than-expected volume of shipped products related to Amazon Prime Day. Due to the seasonality effect in Q2 and the change in Amazon policy related to inventory capacity for third-party sellers, Q3 shipments came in below our expectations, which resulted in lower-than-forecast revenue recovery rates in the quarter.

We've taken both of these factors into consideration in our updated outlook for that business. Revenue recovery is an important offering within our portfolio. It represents a $750 million addressable market across 1P U.S. sellers and a significant cross-selling opportunity within our network, where we're making progress and building momentum. In addition, we're pleased to report we completed our combined go-to-market strategy ahead of schedule, and we are now better positioned to unlock the full potential of this emerging product category.

For example, Cyber Power Systems, a global manufacturer of power protection and management solutions, has partnered with SPS to modernize their business systems and processes since 2014. As a long-standing fulfillment customer, they recently engaged with SPS to drive further efficiencies across their supply chain, leveraging the revenue recovery solution for some of their key customers, including Amazon, Walmart and Home Depot. Having realized immediate benefits in ROI, Cyber Power Systems is evaluating other revenue recovery opportunities across their retail network.

As we discussed at our Investor Day in September, SPS Commerce is well positioned to capitalize on the long-term growth opportunities driven by an ever-evolving retail ecosystem. Having made strategic acquisitions over the past two years to expand our product portfolio and market reach, we shared updates at Investor Day to address how our product strategy and our reimagined go-to-market motion have evolved to empower the kind of trading partner collaboration that enables supply chains to work like they should.

We also hosted a broad cross-section of customers who provided their perspectives on why they chose to work with SPS and how we help them manage supply chain complexity to strengthen their trading partner ecosystems. Most importantly, you heard firsthand accounts of the return on investment that comes from partnering with SPS, such as driving greater operational efficiency and fueling business growth. An example of a recent partnership is Petco, a pet retailer who operates over 1,500 locations in the U.S., Mexico and Puerto Rico, providing both in-store and online omnichannel services.

Leveraging SPS' retailer management solution, Petco transitioned over 700 suppliers to standardized digital supply chain requirements. As a result, the retailer reduced manual data reconciliation across merchandising and supply chain teams, delivered measurable efficiency gains and improved trading partner performance tracking. To summarize, despite the spend scrutiny we are experiencing this year across some of our customer groups, we believe the ever-evolving retail ecosystem will continue to drive the need for supply chain efficiencies.

With our data-driven solutions, SPS Commerce is competitively positioned to improve collaboration between trading partners. We are the industry's most broadly adopted retail cloud services platform and the world's leading retail network. We provide unmatched value in the data that powers AI-driven use cases and a unique network-led growth motion.

Before we dive into our financial results, I'd like to take a moment to share an important leadership update. After nearly 10 years with SPS Commerce, Dan Juckniess, our Chief Revenue Officer, has decided to retire. He will remain with the company through the end of the year to ensure smooth transition. Dan helped shaped SPS' modern go-to-market organization, growing the sales team in both size and strength. On behalf of SPS Commerce, I wish him all the best in retirement. In addition, I'm excited to share that Eduardo Rosini will be joining the SPS Commerce team as Chief Commercial Officer starting December 1.

In this new role at SPS, Eduardo will strengthen our commitment to total customer relationship, maximizing the entire customer life cycle from acquisition to onboarding, retention and expansion and ensuring we deliver consistent, intentional and customer-first experiences around the world. As SPS continues to scale, this evolution helps us deepen relationships, maximize customer value and stay aligned with how global customers view their partnerships with one trusted full-service connection.

Eduardo brings more than 30 years of growth, go-to-market and full customer life cycle experience across industries and markets, most recently serving as Chief Growth Officer at Sage, VP of Mid-market and Corporate Sales at Intuit and in large-scale commercial leadership roles at Microsoft, operating in North America, South America, EMEA and APAC.

His experience leading global organizations, paired with his passion for people and obsession with customers, make him an ideal fit for SPS' next phase of growth. And with that, I'll turn it over to Kim to discuss our financial results.

Thanks, Chad. We reported a solid third quarter of 2025. Revenue was $189.9 million, a 16% increase over Q3 of last year and represented our 99th consecutive quarter of revenue growth. Recurring revenue grew 18% year-over-year. The total number of recurring revenue customers in Q3 was approximately 54,950, an increase of 450 from the prior quarter. ARPU was approximately $13,300. For the quarter, adjusted EBITDA increased 25% to $60.5 million compared to $48.4 million in Q3 of last year.

We ended the quarter with total cash and investments of $134 million and repurchased $30 million of SPS shares. In addition, the Board of Directors has authorized a new program to repurchase up to $100 million of common stock, which becomes effective on December 1 this year and is expected to expire on December 1, 2027. We expect to fully utilize the current program before its termination on July 26, 2026. Before we dive into guidance, I'd like to highlight the factors currently shaping our fourth quarter and 2025 outlook. First, a continued impact to our revenue recovery business resulting from the dynamics Chad laid out in his prepared remarks.

Second, ongoing invoice scrutiny and delayed purchases affecting spend across our fulfillment customers. Lastly, across retail relationship management programs, several large enablement campaigns were pushed from Q4 into the first half of 2026. As a result, we expect a decline in onetime revenue from testing and certification fees associated with these programs. Now turning to guidance. For the fourth quarter of 2025, we expect revenue to be in the range of $192.7 million to $194.7 million, which represents approximately 13% to 14% year-over-year growth. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $58.8 million to $60.8 million.

We expect fully diluted earnings per share to be in the range of $0.53 to $0.57 with fully diluted weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 38.3 million shares. We expect non-GAAP diluted income per share to be in the range of $0.98 to $1.02 with stock-based compensation expense of approximately $15 million, depreciation expense of approximately $5.8 million and amortization expense of approximately $9.5 million. For the full year 2025, we expect revenue to be in the range of $751.6 million to $753.6 million, representing approximately 18% growth over 2024.

We expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $229.7 million to $231.7 million, representing growth of approximately 23% to 24% over 2024. We expect fully diluted earnings per share to be in the range of $2.31 to $2.34 with fully diluted weighted average shares outstanding of approximately 38.1 million shares. We expect non-GAAP diluted income per share to be in the range of $4.10 to $4.15 with stock-based compensation expense of approximately $58.3 million, depreciation expense of approximately $21.1 million and amortization expense for the year of approximately $37.1 million.

For the remainder of the year, on a quarterly basis, investors should model approximately a 30% effective tax rate calculated on GAAP pretax net earnings. Additionally, as a result of the dynamics that are impacting our customers and retail partners this year, we are providing our initial outlook for 2026 and expect to deliver revenue growth without future acquisitions of approximately 7% to 8%.

We continue to expect adjusted EBITDA margin expansion of 2 percentage points, driven by continued improvement in gross margin and operating efficiencies. Longer term, we remain confident in our competitive position and market opportunity and our ability to deliver at least high single-digit annual revenue growth without acquisitions and 2 percentage points in annual adjusted EBITDA margin expansion. And with that, I'd like to open the call to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Scott Berg with Needham.

So I've got a multipart revenue recovery question here. I guess we're all going to have the same questions on this one is, try to help us understand, I guess, when this became apparent in the quarter that the seasonality was a little bit different than you had expected Chad. And as I think about that business going forward, I thought the seasonality in that business was supposed to be stronger in Q4, but it looks like you're reducing your fourth quarter revenues by roughly $6 million, likely all attributed to that business. And then as the natural extension of that is how do we think about that business as impact on that fiscal '26 initial guidance Kim just gave?

Yes, sure. Thanks, Scott. Let me speak maybe to the visibility and how that developed and let Kim speak to the outlook going forward. I'd say late in Q3, we did pick up that the volume of shipments that our customers were sending into Amazon warehouses were a little bit lighter than expected.

In many cases, that can be a leading indicator to revenue that will develop, but I would say not necessarily in all cases. Unfortunately, as we closed out the quarter, we did see a correlation in that reduction of shipments into Amazon warehouses from our customers did result in less revenue than expected. So the shipment visibility kind of became apparent pretty late in Q3, and we really didn't understand the full impact to revenue until we close things out after the quarter ended.

And then when you think about the expectations that we have for the remainder of the year, when you think about the Q4 guidance that we just provided and the variance from that versus the implied Q4 guidance from a quarter ago, the impact on the revenue recovery in that, you should look at that similar as Q3.

So there were three sort of dynamics that I highlighted that went into that, one of them being the revenue recovery, and that component was about similar impact in Q3 and Q4. Then the other two components were a continuation of where we're seeing some invoice scrutiny and delayed purchase decisions as well as some of those retailer enablement campaigns or relationship management campaigns we were initially thinking were going to happen in Q4.

Now those are happening in 2026. And as such, the impact to the P&L in Q4 would be most notable on that onetime revenue of testing and certification just because of the timing of how the subscription revenue works, more of that would show up negatively on the testing and certification in the quarter.

All right. Understood. I guess from a follow-up question, I saw that Dan is leaving. Good luck, Dan. It's been fun working with you, is new Chief Commercial Officer coming in. I guess questions there revolve around what would you expect this new individual to do differently, if anything?

I see his background has been not at one, but at two ERPs that you all certainly partner with today for customers with tightly at least. And just trying to help understand what we might see maybe differently going forward, if anything.

Yes. So let me start with what I think will stay the same, but continuing to improve over time. And that's, first, our differentiated go-to-market that we have with retailer relationship management, where we partner with the retailers to help them establish all their digital connections, that in turn, uncovers suppliers for us and is the largest source of new customers for us.

We've been refining that approach at SPS Commerce for 20 years, and I expect we'll continue to refine that approach for the next 20 years, and it will be great to have Eduardo partner on continued refinements to that, but I expect that will continue. I also expect that our channel go-to-market where we work with a lot of mid-market ERPs will absolutely continue and very excited to what Eduardo can bring to that, which I think will just be a further advancement of that strategy.

Yes, he's worked with a couple -- at a couple of ERP companies that we do partner with, but his whole career has been utilizing a lot of channel to drive mid-market sales, which very much lines up with our business. I think in terms of what may evolve over time that Eduardo will be able to bring us, we'll be really maximizing that expansion and cross-sell motion that we have with existing customers and managing that full life cycle that we have with customers.

We've been quite clear that we believe as our product portfolio expands, the opportunity to increase ARPU is probably going to be the faster growing in our growth algorithm between net new customers and ARPU increases. I think Eduardo's background is really going to help us with that. And then as we become a more global organization and continue with our efforts to expand in Europe, Eduardo certainly brings operating experience across multiple cultures and multiple continents and multiple geographies that I think will help us with that continued growth.

And the next question comes from Chris Quintero with Morgan Stanley.

A lot of moving pieces here. We just went over the revenue recovery piece. But maybe on the organic side, you all called out invoice scrutiny and some of those retail go-to-market programs getting pushed into next year. So just to clarify, are those incremental impacts that you're seeing this quarter versus the last quarter? And why are some of those projects getting pushed out into next year?

Sure. So specific in Q3, Q3 hit our expectations on both of those. The color that I was providing was specific to Q4 and two dynamics in there. So as it relates to 90 days ago, what we were anticipating for the quantity of retail relationship programs and the timing of those programs, that has changed. So instead of many of those happening in Q4, they're now happening earlier in 2026.

So the impact there is on the P&L in 2025. They're not lost programs. It's just the timing of when those are going to happen. Now in some cases, if you think about Q4, it's a really busy time, holiday season. And so it's possible that maybe some of those retailers were a little bit more optimistic of what they thought they would be able to accomplish in Q4.

And in those cases, some of those now are just getting moved into '26, primarily due to the holiday season. And then the second part of that, as it relates to the invoice scrutiny delayed purchase decisions. Again, we hit on that expectation in Q3, but we're starting to see some signs that, that's still continuing on. And in light of that, we wanted to also add that continuation at a little bit higher factored into our updated guidance.

Got it. Okay. So some of the retailers maybe got a little bit over their skis on their expectations for Q4, I guess. As my follow-up, maybe on the network-led growth motion. I know we talked a lot about it at Investor Day, but is there anything you all need to do from an investment standpoint to make that successful? And is there any kind of early evidence that you're seeing how that's progressing or any kind of early proof points?

Yes. I mean we are making investments in this area. I wouldn't describe them as incremental investments to achieve what we want here, more just where we're focusing our team's attention, and we're having great success.

So I think a great example of how this is working is like in revenue recovery, where we're able to get based on the network data, the volume that our customers have trading with certain retail partners where we provide revenue recovery and immediately identify that they are a highly qualified candidate for that revenue recovery solution and automatically serve that up as a leader opportunity to the expansion salesperson that's responsible for that customer so they can engage with them about the benefits they receive from revenue recovery.

That type of motion and triggering it off the network is sort of up and running, and we look forward to continuing to scale that and using that to drive more cross-selling activity. And that's just one example. There's multiple examples where we can identify opportunities right from the network data for further expansion in our customers.

And the next question comes from Matt VanVliet with Cantor.

Obviously, across a lot of the software landscape on the application layer, there's a concern that toolkits from various AI tools and LLM providers are enabling more companies to look internally to maybe build functionality that they don't currently have rather than go out and find a vendor to do that.

Is that at all being mentioned by some of your prospects as to something they're at least exploring and delaying deals? Or any other thoughts there that maybe your stronghold on this position in the market could be cracking a little bit as customers see the -- I guess, the utility of buying something prebuilt isn't as high as it's been for some time?

Well, we are seeing a few headwinds in our demand environment that we mentioned. This AI as a replacement is not one of those things that we're hearing from prospective customers. And I think that's really for a couple of reasons. One is the breadth of the network itself in terms of the rules that are in there and the way that we have built out the compliance capabilities to so many different retailers to where you can connect once and access those.

That's years and years of that intelligence about retailer requirements being built into the network. And quite frankly, it would be very difficult to replicate with LLM or Agentic AI. The second reason is customers are seeing the power of the data that we have in our network and actually seeing that by participating in our network and having access to that data as they advance their AI strategies, the input mechanisms from that data on our network is going to be very powerful to them to execute on their AI strategy.

So it's actually quite complementary there. So I think it's really for those reasons that we're not seeing that as a disruption with the end customers. And then I'd say more broadly about our business and business model, unlike some of the other application providers that provide seat-based licensing, if there's less users and more agents, they're vulnerable because our pricing model is really based on the connections in the network, we think that, that's going to be a more durable model that we have with our customers as more AI kind of takes over.

All right. Helpful. And then I guess as you look towards kind of out to next year and the initial guidance you gave with a little bit of a slowdown, at least relative to where we were expecting, does that change the appetite or the strategy around M&A? And will you potentially look for more tuck-ins that offer a broader set of solutions to appeal to more customers to try to revamp growth? Or anything on that front that you think will be impacted by what's going on today and kind of what the expectations are over the next several quarters?

Yes. I wouldn't necessarily say it drives a change in philosophy. We have a lot of conviction in our M&A philosophy and continue to be active with our M&A pipeline really across what I'd say is kind of a couple of three different areas. One being continued consolidation in the core digital connection or EDI market.

There still are opportunities for further consolidation there. And when we're able to execute on those types of opportunities, one, it's just really good for the customers because they're typically moving from a much smaller network or a point-to-point set of connections and then you move over to our network and really see the benefit of being on this broader connection, our network with lots of connections built in.

The second category is more of the solution expanding or portfolio expanding type acquisitions, similar to what we've done in revenue recovery, and we continue to believe that there'll be more opportunities where we find a solution, it's very applicable to our 50,000-plus customers already on the network and therefore, will drive cross-selling. And a lot of times, we find that these solutions actually get improved by connecting to the network and having access to the data on the network.

And then the third category would be geographic expansion. Admittedly, this one is probably a bit of a lower priority as we continue to drive the execution of our Europe strategy on the back of the TIE Kinetix acquisition. But I think as we continue to get traction in geographies outside of the U.S., we'll be able to use M&A over the long term to continue to build up business and capture more markets outside the U.S.

And the next question comes from George Kurosawa with Citi.

I wanted to dig in on some of the spend scrutiny you called out. This is something you mentioned last quarter as well. Is it right to think of that as being tariff-driven primarily? And then if you could just compare what you saw in Q3 versus Q2. At the time, it seemed like some of that was sort of ring-fenced within your mid-market customers. Have you seen any -- is it more that, that's customer cohort has seen incremental weakness? Or has it maybe spread a little further across the customer base, if that makes sense?

Yes, it makes sense. So I think if we look at customer sentiment right now, and there is some more spend scrutiny coming primarily on the supplier side of our network, I would -- wouldn't say it's exclusively tariff related, but it definitely has a tariff impact.

It does seem that many of our suppliers are absorbing incremental costs for the products that they're selling to retailers and not passing a lot of that on. So therefore, they're looking for other types of cost savings in their organization. And I would say that trend has been consistent. It sort of picked up in Q2 and has carried through Q3.

As it relates to Q3 results, I think that was factored into our original thinking about Q3. The variance that came from Q3 was quite specific to revenue recovery and related to some of the shipment volume changes for Amazon third-party customers.

Okay. Great. And then as a follow-up on that line of thinking in the revenue recovery space, is there any way you can help us think through the performance of maybe the SupplyPike assets versus Carbon6, just to get a better feel for if there's anything sort of underlying happening in this market or if this is just exclusively a function of Amazon-specific dynamics?

Yes. So first, I'll say we have high conviction over the long term in this revenue recovery opportunity. We're seeing very strong interest in it and demand from our fulfillment customers and have some great early adopter customers on the fulfillment side who have taken it. We also believe in the strategy where we were quick to build out a comprehensive set of solutions that one covered a wide set of retailers and two, offered both models kind of a SaaS subscription model and Take Rate model. We're also pleased with the work that we've done integrating those teams across SupplyPike and Carbon6 now into a common go-to-market team that is offering all retailers and offering both sort of pricing models to customers based on their specific needs.

The headwinds that we saw as a result of shipments in Q3 was exclusive to the 3P side of that business. So if you think all of SupplyPike and the retailers they support are primarily 1P, meaning they're shipping wholesale or direct to store for certain retailers. A good portion of the Carbon6 fits with that because it's the 1P model in Amazon.

And then there's another portion of Carbon6 that is the 3P. The variability we saw was in the 3P area. We have not seen much disruption in the 1P area. And as we think strategically, the 3P part of the business is certainly important to us, and it was a sizable portion of Carbon6, and we will continue with that piece of the business.

But we really think of the 1P side as a lot more strategic for us because that 1P seller really lines up with our ideal customer profile on fulfillment. And so therefore, we think over time, we're likely to have a broader product portfolio for that 1P seller. And therefore, the fact that the 1P was the piece that was a little less disrupted, probably a little bit more favorable for us.

And the next question comes from Parker Lane with Stifel.

Kim, maybe if we look to the 7% to 8% outlook you have for '26 initially here, can you just go into the assumptions on the macro environment that are embedded in that? Is that assuming any sort of normalization or improvement in the environment that you're outlining for 4Q? Anything you can offer there?

Yes. So Parker, what I would say is our initial guidance that is on the -- call it, the lower end of the high single digits takes into account the dynamics that we're seeing this year. And obviously, the way recurring revenue works, there are certain aspects of the dynamic this year that just naturally, right, feeds into next year.

And so I think of it more a mid-ish case, meaning we're reflecting what's happened this year, but we also do have optimism as it relates to the business and the opportunity next year that has been taken into account as well. And taking all of that into account, our best view is, call it, that lower end of the high single digit of 7% to 8%.

Got it. And Chad, you just alluded to the new go-to-market team that's combined here for revenue recovery. Can you just talk about how quickly you anticipate that you'll start seeing some of the benefits from that new structure? Is that something that can impact 4Q? Or is it more of a couple of quarters for the team to get its feet underneath it and start to execute?

Yes. So we are seeing some early success in pipeline development and pipeline management and moving deals forward with that combined approach in terms of the -- on the Amazon side, where we did see the headwinds in shipment, actually, some of the new customer acquisition has been tracking ahead of where we expected, which gives us conviction about the total market opportunity.

The thing about Q4, I would say, is most of the customers that we sign up in Q4 are not going to have a meaningful impact on revenue in either the subscription or the take rate model. So I think continued benefits from this new go-to-market are more likely to have may show up kind of through the P&L in the second half of 2027 in a more meaningful way or 2026, excuse me, than in Q4.

And the next question comes from Mark Schappel with Loop Capital.

This is Tim Greaves on for Mark. I guess I want to ask around -- with leveraging your customer change events such as ERP and WMS replacements. Could you provide some directional insight on activity levels you observed there with ERP and WMS replacements, like anything upgrades over the past quarter or two?

Yes. Those -- majority of those change events, which lead to new customers for us are on the ERP side. WMS can be one of them, but I'd say the majority of them are on the ERP side. We have seen some softness in ERP -- sort of changeout or replacement market. And that has come mostly in the area of the what we call the mid-market ERPs. So meaning the very high-end enterprise ERPs, we don't do a ton of business there, but we have seen those deals go through as expected.

And the very low end, the small kind of QuickBooks type systems, those actually have moved forward in more of the mid-market ERPs, the Sage, the Microsoft, the NetSuite, in these areas, we have seen some softness in that market, which then kind of slows down the ability to capture new customers via these change events.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Dylan Becker with William Blair.

This is Jackson Bogli on for Dylan Becker. I was wondering if you could go into the new logo side of the equation here. We saw a little bit of a step-up in the quarter. I was just curious to get your thoughts on how we should think about the new logo momentum going into 2026 despite enablement campaigns getting pushed out, but maybe how you're feeling about going into 2026 with some new logo momentum behind you?

Sure, Jackson. So through the first three quarters of this year, we've added a net 1,100 customers. So to your point, that's at a much higher clip than last year -- last year -- well, and that number excludes M&A. And then last year, the number, excluding M&A was 300 for the year. So to your point, we're at a much accelerated rate. And that's primarily driven by these retailer relationship management programs. In Q3, we also exceeded that expectation. We had assumed it would end up being, call it, a net 350. It ended up closer to a net 450 based on those activities.

So that's great momentum. Specific -- I know you're asking about next year, but I'm just going to give a little color about Q4. So specific to Q4, because of the comments that I made in the prepared remarks, where we have a fair number of those relationship management programs that are pushing from our original expectation of Q4 into 2026, super logical reason why with the holiday season, but knowing that, that is different than we originally anticipated. Our lens for Q4, when we look at our net customer add perspective, we're assuming similar churn to what we've seen in the last couple of quarters.

But since those -- many of those programs have moved out, our expectation for net customer adds in Q4, we expect that number is flat to slightly down potentially in Q4. Again, just that's really timing driven. So then when we think about 2026, we really like the pipeline that we're seeing on relationship management programs.

At this point, similar to what we would have shared at Analyst Day, when we think of that mix of what gets us to that high single-digit growth rate, the expectation would be that customer adds are certainly a part of it, but a larger portion of that growth would be coming from the ARPU side of the equation.

Nothing's changed there relative to our expectation of the mix being more on the ARPU side and less being on the customer growth side, both important, but similar comments to Analyst Day would still remain.

Great. That's helpful. And then one follow-up, if I could. We saw continued margin expansion in the quarter. And I was curious, we've talked about AI a little bit in this call, but what areas are you guys looking to really lean into to drive that further operating leverage in line with your long-term model and maybe how that leads to better network monetization and that AI differentiation building that competitive moat that you guys have?

Yes. Jackson, thanks for picking up on the expanding margins. A lot of that coming from the gross margin. And the driver there in the gross margin is primarily the investments that we have made in our customer experience and in particular, our customer onboarding to the network. That's become much more efficient and that leads to a better customer experience, and that efficiency also has led to some margin improvement.

There's continued improvement that we will drive there, first and foremost, to improve that customer experience and then secondarily, to have that efficiency drive better margin for us. Also, I would say, on the G&A lines and sales and marketing lines, as we continue to scale the business, we think we will get continued efficiency there over time and work towards the targets that we have in our long-term model. You did mention AI.

I would say we do have internal initiatives now to apply AI technology to continue that efficiency journey and looking, first and foremost, at our go-to-market teams, so a combination of marketing and sales and our customer success teams. One, those are probably the most meaningful workflows in terms of they're all customer-facing workflows. That's also where a lot of our people are today. So we think we continue to drive efficiencies that way as well.

And the next question comes from Joe Vruwink with Baird.

Carbon6 and SupplyPike, when they were originally announced, I think they added to $65 million in revenue in fiscal 2025, bringing a faster rate of growth with it. If I annualize this $3 million to $12 million for a year, it's taking off a double-digit proportion from those businesses.

Is that the right way to think of it? And then if I do that into next year, and I'm subtracting off their elevated or what was an elevated growth rate, can you maybe talk about the embedded assumption for revenue recovery within that 7% to 8%? It maybe seems like that side of the business is in line to below the 7% to 8% and the SBS fulfillment business is still kind of above there, but I want to be sure on all that analysis.

Sure. So when we think about that business and we think about it first for the year 2025, we're in around, call it -- within, call it, 10-ish percent of what our original expectations were. When we think about what next year that business represents for us, we still do expect that, that grows at a faster click than our core business.

And keep in mind the comments that Chad added, when we think about the cross-sell muscle here, now that we have the combined go-to-market strategy and the combined teams in place, we do believe there's a lot of opportunity for us in 2026 to really flex that cross-sell muscle. We have some at bats that have worked well for us this year, but it's still very early on. So the fact that we're going to have that for all of next year has also been taken into account and leaves us with strong conviction that, that business still will grow at a faster click than the core business next year.

Okay. That's helpful. And then going back to the customer count, if my math is right, it looks like the 3P side of the count is down maybe 500 logos or 5% since the start of the year. One question, how much of that is churn that you're okay with going back to Chad's comments of you're inheriting a business, but now you're looking to refine it and optimize it for what's going to be more enduring for you going forward?

And then the silver lining of this question is that if you add the 500 logos back to those 1,100 number you were talking about earlier at the corporate level, 1,600 added for legacy SPS Commerce is a pretty good number. And I wanted to just ask kind of where that's being driven within the environment of spend through the need.

Sure. So when you think about the customer count, to your point, we show the number as total customers, but then we do break that out within supplemental in the 10-Q. So if you think about the 3P side of the business in the quarter in Q3, the 3P customer count declined approximately 150. So just as a reminder, when we acquired the Carbon6 business, that added about 8,500 customers, of which the vast majority were 3P, about 8,200 of that 8,500 were 3P.

So what we've seen in that business is specific -- it's actually specific in Q3, where that is down approximately 150. And when I think about the business, one, there tends to just be more churn, right, in that 3P business. It's also a much smaller ASP per customer. And there's also some, I'd call them, nonstrategic ancillary type products that we offer to 3P customers. And in those areas, we have seen some of that churn off. Our expectation would be in some of those areas, we'd expect to see that 3P customer count decline a little bit, very immaterial on the overall revenue, but that trend we saw in Q3, we would expect that, that trend would also continue into Q4 and beyond.

So when you think about the business overall, there's the 1P side and the 3P side. The 1P side has much larger revenue per customer or ARPU per customer. The quantity of customers acquired was much skewed to the 3P side. Again, we definitely see a bit more churn there and also the nonstrategic part of the business. But where we saw a decline, really, I would characterize that as really starting in Q3 at that sort of net 150 and wouldn't be imprudent to assume that we're sort of at that clicked going forward as well.

Then last thing, to your point, that means the -- over the 1P customers actually grew more. So the net 450 would actually be a higher number when you're looking at the 1P customer adds to your point.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.