Yahoo Finance Overstock.Com Inc (OSTK) Q1 2019 Earnings Call Transcript
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Overstock.Com Inc (NASDAQ: OSTK)
Q1 2019 Earnings Call
May. 9, 2019, 8:30 a.m. ET
Contents:
Prepared Remarks
Questions and Answers
Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Q1 2019 Overstock.com Inc Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode (Operator Instructions). Also, as a reminder, this conference call is being recorded.
At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to your host, Greg Iverson, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.
Gregory J. Iverson -- Chief Financial Officer
Good morning, and welcome to our first quarter 2019 earnings conference call. Joining me today are Dr. Patrick Byrne, Founder, CEO and President; Saum Noursalehi, CEO of tZERO; Jonathan Johnson, President of Medici Ventures; Seth Moore, Chief Strategy Officer; and J.P. Knab, Chief Marketing Officer.
Let me remind you that the following discussion and our responses to your questions reflect management's view as of today, May 9th 2019, and may include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially.
Additional information about factors that could potentially impact our financial results is included in our Form 10-K for 2018, our subsequent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in the press release filed today. Please review the forward-looking statements disclosure in Slide 2 of today's presentation.
During this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. The slides accompanying this webcast and our filings with the SEC, each posted on our Investor Relations website, contain additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including reconciliations of these measures to the most comparable GAAP measures.
With that, I will turn the call over to Patrick.
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
Thank you, Greg. This is our agenda for today. A nice tight agenda. We have lots of developments to be discussing with you. So let's get to it. Jonathan?
Jonathan E. Johnson -- President, Medici Ventures
Okay. Thank you, Patrick. Back to work. Our shareholders will remember that on our last earnings call, Patrick explained how Medici's business initiatives are developing and advancing a blockchain tech stack for society with a new focus on our government as a service model.
Next slide, please. Medici is creating or fostering a set of products and solutions that leverage the transparency and the mutability of blockchain technology. These products do and will generate efficiencies and increase security and control in the six areas listed on the slide that are part of Patrick's vision.
Next slide, please. To execute this vision, Medici Ventures has put together a Keiretsu or network of companies that can work together in performing different functions. Sometimes, we found companies to bring into the fold. Other times, we started companies from scratch. What's important is that each company is focused on getting blockchain products into production.
Next slide, please. During today's call we will highlight what three of these companies are doing, not just talking about doing, but actually doing in the blockchain space. As we have in the past, we'll start with tZERO. Saum?
Saum Noursalehi -- Director, Chief Executive Officer-tZERO
Thank you, Jonathan. tZERO is executing and gaining momentum. We have some nice wins to discuss and more coming in the months ahead. Next slide. On our last call, we presented the next critical milestones for tZERO. I'm going to provide a detailed update on each of these items. Next slide. Our first milestone was to onboard quality issuers and (technical difficulty) we just signed an LOI with Omar, the developer of Dubai's iconic Burj Khalifa and the Dubai Mall for a very substantial tokenization project. 1B, by the end of the month, our trading platform will support trading of thirty-party tokens from the issuance platform known as Securitize --
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
-- which is really the leading issuance --
Saum Noursalehi -- Director, Chief Executive Officer-tZERO
-- issuance platform. And 1C, we are in the process of migrating tokenized share of Overstock preferred shares OSTKP onto tZERO's trading platform. Trading for these shares will go live in June. Patrick, do you want to add anything on that?
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
No, that's great.
Saum Noursalehi -- Director, Chief Executive Officer-tZERO
Next slide. Expand token investor base and really boost liquidity. 2A, we signed a contract with broker-dealer ETC to allow clients to trade our security tokens. 2B, by the end of the month, tZERO will file to become our own retail broker-dealer. 2C, we will -- we are in discussions with other BDs interested in trading our assets, and this was one of the big benefits of the acquisition of SpeedRoute is we have relationships with over 150 broker-dealers and many of them are already expressing interest in trading security tokens --
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
-- and if someone is already integrated into -- if a broker-dealer is already integrated into SpeedRoute, how much worth is it to bring up our security token ecosystem?
Saum Noursalehi -- Director, Chief Executive Officer-tZERO
It's within weeks we can bring up an additional broker-dealer, even probably a couple of weeks. Now that does need regulatory signoff. But the technology makes it very easy to do that.
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
Great.
Saum Noursalehi -- Director, Chief Executive Officer-tZERO
Next slide. International, which is our software-as-a-service play, we want to replicate what we've done in the US with our joint venture with BOX internationally. So what we've done, 3A, is get our technology ready to offer as a service to other exchanges. And so all that technology work is done, we can offer it to exchanges around the world. 3B, we're in discussions with several exchanges in Europe, Asia and in Canada and those discussions are ongoing.
Next slide. On this slide do you see markups of our crypto trading app which is on track for a June launch. So initially this will the trade just Bitcoin and Ethereum -- but --
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
-- and maybe Raven.
Saum Noursalehi -- Director, Chief Executive Officer-tZERO
-- and potentially something else Ravencoin. And -- but down the road, this app is really going to evolve and be the foundation of our brokerage trading system which will include both digital and non-digital assets. So while it starts with crypto, it's going to evolve into something much bigger.
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
So in that respect, it is something like Robinhood, only better and different business.
Saum Noursalehi -- Director, Chief Executive Officer-tZERO
Right.
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
-- different business now.
Saum Noursalehi -- Director, Chief Executive Officer-tZERO
-- although with security tokens and digital assets. N
ext slide. Other initiatives, 5A. The next phase of our Digital Locate Receipt product is on track for August. And the team has been meeting, has built out a nice roadmap and we're looking forward to that launch. 5B, we're targeting an end of year launch for the BSTX, the Boston Security Token Exchange, which will be the first national exchange for trading security tokens.
Next slide. Lastly, we'd like to show you again chart of our updated product roadmap. Note that we recently completed the issuance platform tokenization technology which is circled in the dotted blue line. Again, this is -- this technology will be used to create token contracts on the blockchain for issuers using our token standards.
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
I love this. I'll just drop in here and mention I note -- I note that sometimes people ask us -- tell me that the rumor is tZERO, I don't know if they're actually getting anything done. And I find that hilarious because I've never seen a company that puts out its product development roadmap in a (inaudible) and Saum has been hitting (inaudible) for the last year and has been hitting knocking these down just exactly on time.
Saum Noursalehi -- Director, Chief Executive Officer-tZERO
Great. With that, let me turn it back to Jonathan to talk about the other Medici companies.
Jonathan E. Johnson -- President, Medici Ventures
Thanks Saum. As our shareholders can see, tZERO has made and is making significant progress in just a few weeks since we last talked to you. tZERO is proving its great potential to use blockchain to revolutionize capital markets. Many of the Medici Ventures companies have this same type of revolutionary potential. Most have made progress over the last quarter, but because of limited time, I will now briefly focus on two of those companies, GrainChain and Voatz.
Next slide. GrainChain is a Texas-based company with a blockchain platform for the agricultural business. It's transforming the way in which farmers, buyers and grain elevators operate. GrainChain's platform ensures prompt payment to suppliers and farmers and it facilitates the immediate availability of tradable commodities to buyers. Through certification and accountability, GrainChain's products mitigate fraud and corruption and streamline procedures for everyone involved in the market. Now, historically, the process for recording grain and its movement throughout the supply chain has been cumbersome and inefficient, often with lots of mistakes along the way. People would need to record data by hand such as the grain's weight, its condition et cetera. Perhaps worst of all, approximately 30% of the world's grain rots in part because of poor processes.
GrainChain recently announced that the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, the largest producer of sorghum in Mexico, now supports the incorporation of GrainChain's blockchain technology for the tracking of grain. This Mexican state will utilize GrainChain's blockchain and Internet of Things software to bring clarity to the way grain is tracked from the farm to the marketplace. This is a blockchain product in production that will help farmers be paid more quickly, GrainChain elevators better track supply, real product in production to improve people's lives.
Next slide. Let me turn to Voatz, a Boston-based company using blockchain technology to provide a safe and secure mobile elections platform. On our last earnings call, I talked about how the City and County of Denver would be using the Voatz applications to provide mobile voting secured by blockchain to deploy military personnel and other overseas United States citizens during the upcoming municipal elections. That election closed on Tuesday. The vote went well. The mandatory five-day audit is ongoing.
This is great work and great news for Voatz. What's next on Voatz' roadmap is more states and municipalities see how easy it is to use the Voatz product. I expect to see its adoption continues to grow and I expect to see cities and counties using the Voatz product to help the disabled more easily, safely and securely vote.
Next slide. Medici Ventures is building a solid keiretsu. These companies are getting blockchain products into production and those products are being adopted more broadly and used in more ways that are improving people's lives. Going forward, we will keep our shareholders on its products and as our government as a service model takes shape. Patrick?
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
Thank you, Jonathan. Let's turn to recap. We've got a lot to do with the discussion we have. Next slide. The retail -- the course has corrected. I'm going to turn over to Seth Moore.
Seth A. Moore -- Chief Strategy Officer
Great. You'll recall from our last earnings call that we said we would return to profitable growth focusing on contribution, expense structure optimization and repairing our rankings in natural search. We're pleased to report that we're trending ahead of plan on all three fronts and repairing our rankings in natural search. We're pleased to report that we're trending ahead of plan on all three fronts with contribution growing north of 110%, our G&A structure having been reduced by roughly 25% through a combination of eliminating redundant software licenses, improved automation and reduction in headcount and our SEO rankings have improved throughout the month of March. As a result, our ad spend was more efficient than we had forecasted for the quarter. Our site converted better and our gross margins came through a more positive than we had anticipated in the middle of the quarter.
On Slide 21, we expect to see continued improvement for several of these initiatives like expansions to our A.I. automation, improved personalization and site experience through our focus on CRM and also improvements in the monetization of our site traffic through new ad tech.
For more color on that, let me turn it over to JP.
John Paul Knab -- Chief Marketing Officer
Great. Thanks Seth. We're really excited about this project. Our current ad tech has two limitations, lag time and the ultimate relevancy you can achieve. We've had 10 teams across the company building a new ad tech which went live last week in alpha. This solves those the two problems and allows us to open up far more valuable real estate to our co-op partners and better monetize our tens of millions of monthly visitors. The machine learning layer which handles both the auction and the relevancy ensures the experience is relevant to our consumers. Our estimate is that this additional real estate will be at least five times more valuable to our co-op partners. This is not only a huge win for our partners but will have strong impact on our bottom line results as it ramps up this Q3 and forward.
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
Let me mention on, before we move on, just on machine learning and A.I., I've mentioned before that in our 19 years, we've seen a number of revolutions in digital marketing and the Internet and some of them we caught and we're early in and some of them we were -- we didn't catch the first wave A.I. and machine learning we caught and we built a great team, one run by our fabulous woman her,e and what we have probably integrated it to about 30% to 40% of the places it needs to integrate throughout the company and is just utterly a game-changer for us. So Seth, go ahead.
John Paul Knab -- Chief Marketing Officer
Great. You'll also recall we mentioned in our last quarterly call that gross margins in Q4 and Q1 were suppressed year-over-year as we rebalanced freight lanes and carriers to improve efficiency, but with these changes (technical difficulty) we're pleased to say that we believe we are ahead of schedule (technical difficulty) benefits of reduced shipping costs and making those transitions and think that this will provide (technical difficulty) than we anticipated six weeks ago.
So let's jump to slide 22. Slide 22. The result of all of this is that the quarter ended at $39 million in contribution or 110% ahead of last year and $2 million better than we had forecasted on our last earnings call. This improvement since our last call is largely attributable to more efficient ad spend rates and better gross margins as a result of our supply chain optimization initiatives yielding more benefits in quarter than we had expected.
So let's go ahead to Slide 23. With our expenses trending on plan, this means we finished the quarter $2 million better in adjusted EBITDA than we had previously forecasted and at near break-even levels for the full quarter on a retail stand-alone basis.
So let's jump to Slide 24. I would add that in addition to this better than expected improvement in contribution, the quarter also represented our first double-digit contribution (technical difficulty) 2017 in spite of the fact that the carry on freight lane transitions are creating significant headwind in gross margin this quarter.
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
And I'll jump in and I just want to emphasize that, so even with that headwind, we have our contribution margin back into double digits and that those changes in logistics are going to pay big demand in the second half of this year. And I want to jump again on that, in the lower left hand corner, contribution. I told everybody in the last conference call that this was going to be a year of extraordinary growth in contribution which is gross profit minus advertising costs which is really what everybody in the Internet runs to and manages to and optimizes to, and that 111% increase is actually above plan for us and this is the year of again very high growth in that number to get us back to profitability. Go ahead.
John Paul Knab -- Chief Marketing Officer
Great. Let's jump to Slide 25. So one of the biggest reasons that we were able to overcome that gross margin headwind and post such significant contribution gains can be seen on this slide. After sequential month-over-month declines in natural search rankings for 15 months out of 16 months from early 2017 through Q3 of 2018, we've now posted seven consecutive months of sequential month-over-month growth. Again, I should say these are not year-over-year numbers, these are month-over-month improvements showing steady improvements in SEO rankings every month since September.
This trend of improvement is helping us reduce our reliance on paid media and focus on targeted acquisition of high value customers with our marketing dollars. It also is a leading indicator to the strength of our retargeting programs, display and email which we believe will continue to strengthen as the year goes on in tandem with these ranking improvements.
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
And I would add while we've seen incredible progress this year, we still believe we have a lot of room left to grow. We by no means think we've maxed out the gains available to us in SEO.
John Paul Knab -- Chief Marketing Officer
So let's go and jump to the next slide. Here, you'll see, we have also experienced tremendous growth, 32% year-over-year in paid Club O memberships and the percentage of our sales coming from Club O is now well over 25%. These members are extremely loyal and worth a multiple to us of what a standard customer is, and because of the growth in this loyalty program, it means we can be more targeted in our acquisitions rather than doing expensive and continuous reacquisition the way so much of the Internet operates. We think this is really key to maintaining long-term, profitable, sustainable growth.
So let's go to Slide 27.
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
Okay, so last time I spoke to you we were just coming up on the point where those lines crossed and now we have passed through them and what that means is that we are generating in contribution that is gross profit minus advertising more than enough to cover our actual expense structure. And that's a magic point to be, that's a magic point to be in. And I remember somebody asked a couple of quarters ago, did they think we could even in two years get back to this point? And I had to laugh because I actually knew that we were getting back there in February or March. But anyway, we have recovered, we have readjusted our expense structure, and we have our contribution soaring again.
Next slide. I will just compare that to the competition and their march to profitability, when those two lines cross on the right is when our competition will reach profitability. We have now of course our competition has other things to go for, it's growing a lot faster, and it's burning billions of dollars that we don't have. My point in putting these up is while there's a lot of great and worse things that could be said about the company on the right, one thing that can be said on the company on the left is that business model where the contribution exceeds the expense structure is a sustainable business model.
You can do that forever, you can keep your nose two inches above the waterline forever, you can't keep your nose two feet below the waterline forever, but maybe there's a plan there that I've missed to date. Anyway, let's go on to the next slide. This puts us in the point actually raising our guidance, you know, it's been quite rare in our history we've given any guidance, and when we do expect specific numbers, I said the last last time we spoke that you could expect us to be hitting contribution of $160 million to $180 million, we're now raising all that $5 million. And that means that we're raising our guidance for adjusted EBITDA for the year up 50%. We're taking it from $10 million to $15 million with a bullet as they would say in the Top 40 because I think that you will see that number quite possibly slide up over the course of the year. But all that said, we're taking our guidance up to $15 million for the year. Next slide. Really pleased to report Dave Nielsen is becoming today the President of Retail. He joined us 10 years ago. He's worked -- he's a real professional from the world of retail and worked with us for some years, left us three years, was the CEO of another company, came back and has been a great partner for the last six months and a lot of this restructuring and rejiggering of the company. And I know the whole company celebrates that he is now replacing me as President of Retail. Next. Strategic alternatives. Seth, why don't you take it?
Seth A. Moore -- Chief Strategy Officer
Yes, we've mentioned in our last several calls that we're exploring strategic alternatives for the retail business including potentially hybridizing with a national brick and mortar rather non-retail web property because we believe that in the long run hybridization is a superior model to go it alone pure play e-commerce in the home goods industry. We've also said, however, that we're going to run the retail businesses that we're going to hold it forever and optimize its cash generating value. Unsurprisingly, the positive cash flow trajectory of the business has attracted the interest of additional prospective buyers interested in our technical capabilities, dropship supply network and low working capital cash generating model. As a result, we feel we maximized shareholder value by facilitating their diligence and entertaining their interest before making our final decision among strategic alternatives.
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
Slide 33, GSR. I am delighted to report that GSR and tZERP executed an investment agreement, they are just putting in $5 million in cash and marketable securities. The transfer is in process. And that's at a $1 billion dollar post-money valuation, and we're letting them out of all previous contracts, agreements, LOIs et cetera. And now they are -- we are continuing with Makara amd GSR may continue to -- may proceed to be involved in that Makara deal. But in the meantime, we got $5 million out of this for all for a year -- for a year of a lot of frequent flier miles.
Let's go to 34. Now, Makara has -- is an independent fund, it's independent of GSR, it is Makara's -- in Singapore, they continue to do deep and due diligence on us on our business model, our intellectual property, we can't commit that there's gonna be an investment made. They are -- they have the behavior of a serious professional fund and we remain engaged to our advisors with them and discussions are daily.
Jonathan E. Johnson -- President, Medici Ventures
Yes. So we keep -- we're working closely with Makara, our advisors are talking to them, their diligence is real, and we're moving forward. And sometimes these things take longer than one hopes, but it's moving forward. So next slide, 35.
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
Liquidity. Our cash balance was $120 million on the balance sheet, but actually in the days immediately after the end of the quarter, we finished the APM, so really another $20 million. We feel good about that, $140 million because of the changes Greg made in the payment schedule. This is not directly comparable with previous years because the highs and lows, the amplitude between high and low has been drastically reduced. So we feel quite good about this and it is my constraint that I'm operating in that I think retail is -- will be doing as I've said this year and next year will be back into place where it'll be spitting out lots of cash and the whole blockchain side of the business will be structured so that next year just the cash that retail spits out supports the blockchain side of the business. So -- as a worst case, we're all good. Now if anything happens after that, like there is financing and capitalization of some of these blockchain companies where tZERO turns into the oil gusher that I think it is, then that's all gravy. Yeah. Seth, you want to add?
Seth A. Moore -- Chief Strategy Officer
Yeah, I would add as a point of clarification on that, that the way most e-commerce companies payment cycles work, they have negative working capital cycles where they get paid by consumers but then pay the dropship vendors on a delay. And most companies make those payments call it once a month on the first of the month. So at the end of every quarter, they're always at their cash peak, so their publicly reported cash numbers are the highest numbers their cash ever reaches. We've reduced that amplitude between the peak and the valley before and after payment cycles this quarter. And so this isn't directly comparable to previous quarter and cash reporting cycles we've issued and it's actually a significantly higher average cash balance than what we've reported in previous periods.
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
Right. Okay. Next slide. So to summarize, retail has come back, it's come back and not for raising our outlook for the year from $10 million to $15 million, it's come back both because we've radically revisited our expense structure because the machine learning is kicking in across the business, it's driving ad spend efficiency frankly, I mean the machine learning is doing very, very well at things that a decade ago we were proud that we were getting PhDs in math to do, it turns out machine learning can beat them all, and our site performance has never been better. So you see in -- you see in the alpha through echo in the bottom row, you see these graphs such as the return -- the V-shape return of our retail bottom line where we are we have in broad where you see we have crossed the line back into where gross profit minus advertising expense covers the cost of running the business. What we expect that contribution to be and hence our bottom line to be is going up and hence we're raising guidance for the year. In Delta, you see this product roadmap from Saum and tZERO, and that's really the main event, I have to say this is, while it's important that we've got retail back in -- back to the point where it's adding, it's generating cash, at the end of the day, we see now that tZERO is this enormous opportunity. And the fact that we've laid out for almost a year now these roadmaps had been hitting all these marks, I think has been somewhat unnoticed. And under echo, there is the keiretsu that Jonathan has assembled and I think there's -- there may be nothing like it in the world, if there's anything else, there's only one other thing like this in the world.
So with that set of -- with that set of comments and charts, let's turn to questions.
Questions and Answers:
Jonathan E. Johnson -- President, Medici Ventures
Great, thanks, Patrick. So you've got about a dozen questions come in and I'm going to pick them in the order the companies that we've presented with. So we'll start with tZERO. Saum, someone has asked about updates on timing of opening the ATS for trading for tZERO tokens to all investors, not just accredited investors.
Saum Noursalehi -- Director, Chief Executive Officer-tZERO
Yes. The lockup ends in August. So I believe it's around maybe mid August when it opens up to the masses for trading our tokens.
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
And that's not a technology limitation, that's a regulatory gap limitation.
Saum Noursalehi -- Director, Chief Executive Officer-tZERO
Due to the Reg D offering we did.
Jonathan E. Johnson -- President, Medici Ventures
Great. And can you give us an update on the BOX joint venture foreign exchange?
Saum Noursalehi -- Director, Chief Executive Officer-tZERO
Yes. The technology for the joint venture is complete. So BSPX is essentially licensing the tech that we had built for our ATS, a separate version of that, and there's been a lot of work done on building a rule book for these digital assets and how to treat them. And that draft of that rule book has been submitted to the SEC. And so we're awaiting their response.
Jonathan E. Johnson -- President, Medici Ventures
Okay. Thanks. So on the Medici front, the question came in about Medici Ventures has just had a new Chief Technology Officer. What's his role and will he influence the strategic direction of the keiretsu, and why or why not?
So Jeremy Smith is our new CTO. He is a great hire, wonderful manager, a great technologist. He will influence the strategic direction of the family of companies to the extent that they're using Medici Ventures developers. Several of the companies in the family of companies have their development work done by Medici Ventures. Jeremy is imminently involved in all of those. Our keiretsu companies come to Salt Lake a couple of times a year. They hear what Jeremy is thinking about technology. So there's indirect influence on a broad scale and direct influence on specific companies.
The next question and I'll just read this as it came in, asked for an update on the Mt. Rushmore of Medici Ventures companies, tZERO, bitt, Medici Land Governance, and Voatz.
It's an interesting way to refer to them. We've given a pretty fulsome report on both Voatz and tZERO. Bitt continues to work closely with the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank. That project is moving forward. The development of that project is happening here in Salt Lake with the Medici developers taking the lead. Medici Land Governance continues to be around the world. The product -- the projects in Africa, Mexico and Wyoming are going well. I think we can expect other announcements from Medici Land Governance in the next weeks and months.
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
Right. Let me make a comment on that too. I've just been -- so I've described in previous calls the government as a service, the blockchain tech stack, I've just been in Washington D.C. with World Bank and Africa Development Bank and Inter-American Development Bank and a whole bunch of ministers from foreign countries. Everybody wants this, I mean we're really at the point where we're trying to decide what country is the country to make as to take as I would say prototype testbed for these technologies. But there are so many countries reaching out for this tech stack or slices of it that we're really in the (inaudible) with that and Medici Land Governance in fact I think you'll have -- we may have -- or will have some significant announcements in the next week. It's just amazing to me, the scale of that business maybe even bigger than tZERO.
Jonathan E. Johnson -- President, Medici Ventures
And I will say, it's pretty interesting, the heads of states and the ministers that we're talking to in various Medici Ventures companies, it's pretty exciting.
There's a question last quarter, Jonathan, you said most of the Medici Ventures companies were generating revenue. Can you elaborate on that?
That continues to be the case. Sometimes, it's small, start-up revenue where there are small start-up company. Other times, it's growing into more. We don't provide particulars on those other than the ones that are in the 10-Q because we consolidate. But we're pleased with the growth of most of the Medici Ventures companies.
Last Medici questions is, can you give us any thoughts on security token offerings or more of the Medici Ventures companies beyond tZERO?
And I would say, Patrick, I know you want to add to this. But I would say that that's something that once the next steps is the tZERO roadmap was built out, as many of the Medici Ventures companies are looking at, we're not going to -- we can't be in a place to force any of them to do that. This is a great way for them to mark it up.
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
I agree. There's a great way for them to capitalize up and there's a lot of things in there -- that security service may be great for and we're working with all kinds of those three companies around the country that are trying to, and one in Asia at least, who are trying to bring security tokens to REITs, for example, and disrupt that industry. There is a -- there's somebody in Hollywood who wants to bring security tokens to Hollywood financing and disrupt that, and commodities and energy and et cetera, et cetera. But it's so weird. Saum has really built the crossroads that people are coming to. And so basically all these -- all the security token work that you hear really around the world, people are coordinating with Saum on what's going on in tZERO. I'm not sure that's even an exaggeration.
Jonathan E. Johnson -- President, Medici Ventures
Well, I think this is a perfect example of the benefits of a keiretsu. That's a Japanese term where there are companies of interlocking ownership that can work together to their mutual benefit.
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
And I think --
Jonathan E. Johnson -- President, Medici Ventures
And that's just going to happen with tZERO is it they have this platform.
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
I think that one of right and I think that besides it getting into the world of REITs and besides getting into the world of Hollywood finance and all these other things, a great application for security tokens is going to become in Reg-A plus offerings, small company offerings. And so why not use and get along the model of Jonas Salt (ph). Let's use maybe we have a couple of our small blockchain companies to very small offering, it's on tZERO, and in the process, we develop whatever needs to be developed to support Reg-A offerings for small companies.
Jonathan E. Johnson -- President, Medici Ventures
Okay. Turning to retail. Question number one, what gives you confidence in your ability to generate positive sales growth or while significantly scaling back your investment spending in the retail. Patrick, I'm not sure that question makes a lot of sense (inaudible) want to address it.
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
I know that we can -- again, I'm taking growth this year to mean contribution dollars, and I said we could grow it from whatever I said last time $80 million to $160 million. But I really think it's $80 million to $185 million or $200 million. And that's the main event. I am confident that we can scale, that we can grow dramatically those contribution dollars this year and next. And that's the key -- that's that's the main event. At this point, I'm not in the game of trying to slug it out with a competitor who is -- who lost over $500 million last year and I lost $150 million last quarter and has lost $2 billion in the last six or seven years. I'm not going to slug it out with them. We're going to have a company that spits out $50 million -- a retail company that spits out $50 million a year. I'd rather have that company than worry about chasing a top line again and having a company losing the kinds of money we would have to lose to compete there. Seth, do you want to add something to that?
Seth A. Moore -- Chief Strategy Officer
Yeah. In terms of -- you know, we gave the guidance that we would return to slight growth in Q4 of this year for top line sales. The way we can continue growing contribution like Patrick said while posting those positive returns is through significant improvement in SEO and then retention on the other side from Club O. We showed you those numbers with massive improvements in the loyalty program, more than 25% of revenue there, you don't need big marketing dollars to keep the members of your loyalty program active. And likewise, SEO, as the traffic feeder into your retention channels, it doesn't require big advertising investments. And so that's really the growth engine for the company going forward both from a contribution standpoint and also from a sales standpoint.
Jonathan E. Johnson -- President, Medici Ventures
Okay. Next question, and I'm watching the clock, where are you in your efforts to improve SEO? Can you talk about that a little bit, Seth, (inaudible).
Seth A. Moore -- Chief Strategy Officer
Yeah. We've made great improvement there. March was again another big positive sequential month month-over-month in rankings. And you know if you look at it, we still have lots and lots of headroom. I think we can easily double what we have in SEO from where it is here and that's just getting us back to where we were in 2017. And so I think we have a lot more months of improvement in front of us. And I think that has the potential to be a growth engine for us for the next year or two to come.
Jonathan E. Johnson -- President, Medici Ventures
Okay. Great. JP, this next question maybe goes directly to you. Talked about Wayfair has indicated it spends 10% of its budget on direct mail and 15% on TV. How does that compare to Overstock's allocations and how do we determine our allocations?
John Paul Knab -- Chief Marketing Officer
Now, the direct mail, we spend below that 10%. We have found that direct mail, while it can give you some pretty quick revenue bounces early on, has an uncertain return to the bottom line and longer windows. So we haven't invested heavily as Wayfair had there. We're about the same ratio on TV, in that same range. The way we determine that is we had the top-down media mix model that bounces up against a bottoms-up multi-touch attribution model. We then use a layer of incremental testing with all the major players in this space and that triangulates into what we see as our optimal mix.
Jonathan E. Johnson -- President, Medici Ventures
JP, I'm glad you're over with those budgets.
John Paul Knab -- Chief Marketing Officer
I was just thinking, yeah, this is Commander Data, and yeah I was just thinking the same thing.
Jonathan E. Johnson -- President, Medici Ventures
And Patrick around the same thing. JP, this one's probably for you too. Pinterest just went public. How does Overstock use Pinterest, and how has that changed over time?
John Paul Knab -- Chief Marketing Officer
Yeah, Pinterest has one of the earlier touch points with consumers. So if you look at an average conversion window, there are more than 30-day to 45-day windows, so a little bit longer than other players. So we often work with Pinterest, we have a great relationship with them. They're going to early read on what's the customer looking for, what type of home category, and we work with them to then translate that into our experience on our site, that fulfills on the product they're looking for. So great relationship with them, we have a good budget with Pinterest and continue to find more ways to advance that.
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
We have a huge budget with -- you have a huge budget with Pinterest. I will mention that a year-and-a-half, two years ago, we told you about an innovation we had discovered in marketing and we're using it and we're not going to disclose it because we thought it was so good and it really was Pinterest. It was Pinterest and social media because it's shifting. People go to Pinterest 30 days before they buy to get inspiration, they go to a search engine eight days before they buy. And we learned that it was fairly underpriced really, reaching people through there was as yet underpriced. And so we I think we've been -- JP has been an innovator in moving us up that funnel to -- and the work we're doing with Pinterest like frankly the work I hear as doing it Facebook and Google impartially being told by people in these other companies that the work we're doing is at the leading very edge of the work that they do.
Jonathan E. Johnson -- President, Medici Ventures
Great. How are your international sales progressing? Seth, you want to tackle that one?
Seth A. Moore -- Chief Strategy Officer
Yeah, I would say probably the biggest callout for international is that during Q1 they've slipped to posting positive contribution for the business. So they're creative to the contribution of the company which is unlike many of our competitors who lose truckloads of money out of their international businesses. And so yes, the international business continues to progress. We continue to get deeper penetration into Canada and we're doing it with positive contribution benefits to the business overall.
Jonathan E. Johnson -- President, Medici Ventures
Great. Amazon just went one-day Prime for Prime. Could we go to one day if necessary?
Seth A. Moore -- Chief Strategy Officer
So one thing I would call out with Prime and shipping time frames, you will see almost no furniture inside of Prime. And the reason is large inventory and particularly home goods tends to turn at a much slower pace. And it's also very large in terms of its space requirements. So going from two-day to one-day shipping means you need a large multiple of the number of nodes with inventory in them to manage that which means there is an exponential cost addition to having slow turns. That's why Amazon does not carry lots of furniture in Prime or rugs or other home goods. It's also why even other home goods players who try to do it end up stocked out in so many locations that they still don't get nationwide footprints with two-day to one-day shipping very frequently because the inventory management exercise is so difficult.
That said, we are making huge progress with our third-party logistics program through our dropship suppliers. We can now out of three warehouses because of the innovative things we're doing in freight ship home goods into a two-day shipping zone to 98$of the country out of three nodes with a much more limited inventory base than what our competitors are able to. And we're seeing great returns and great adoption in that program that's helping drive some of the supply chain efficiencies we've been referencing throughout the call.
Jonathan E. Johnson -- President, Medici Ventures
Okay. Thank you, Seth. Last question for retail, advertising on e-commerce platforms is becoming commonplace, did Overstock start doing that and (inaudible)?
Seth A. Moore -- Chief Strategy Officer
Just a potential definitions of e-commerce platform, I'm going to assume they mean other pure plays or other retailers here. We do. The way we evaluate it is if an e-commerce platform has unique access to a customer that we couldn't get through another method, we will consider and place product there to get that customer, if that's the unique approach to get that. We're careful in both trying to obtain consumer information. So we have options to retarget as well as making sure that that is a healthy relationship. But we do evaluate all e-commerce platforms, are in many of them and have very specific guidelines about how we run those platforms -- inside those platforms.
Jonathan E. Johnson -- President, Medici Ventures
Great. Okay, so that's all the questions that came in ahead of time. We appreciate shareholders asking questions. We remind everyone listening on this call that our Annual Shareholder Meeting is this afternoon at 1:00 p.m. Mountain, 3:00 p.m. Eastern, that's webcast, we will be taking questions and doing Q&A then, so we invite anyone who didn't get their question answered this time to participate then. Patrick, before we sign off, is there anything you'd like to tell our shareholders.
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
It's an honor working for smart shareholders and I think we have -- I think we're really (inaudible), you're going to see it this year --
Jonathan E. Johnson -- President, Medici Ventures
You're going to see it this quarter -- this quarter in weeks you're going to be seeing some remarkable products hit the world out of tZERO and then you may even see Overstock promoting. Okay. Thank you, Patrick, you've run out of time. Shareholders, thanks for participating, thanks for entrusting your capital with us, we're working hard, we'll talk to you in a quarter.
Operator
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for attending today's conference. This concludes the program. You may all disconnect. Good day.
Duration: 48 minutes
Call participants:
Gregory J. Iverson -- Chief Financial Officer
Patrick Byrne -- Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President
Jonathan E. Johnson -- President, Medici Ventures
Saum Noursalehi -- Director, Chief Executive Officer-tZERO
Seth A. Moore -- Chief Strategy Officer
John Paul Knab -- Chief Marketing Officer
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