We reactivated 6 million lapsed buyers, up 19% year-over-year, with the vast majority of these reactivated buyers in the U.S. Our retention rates improved from the prior year and remain above pre-pandemic levels on a trailing 12-month basis, providing further evidence that our investments over the past few years have enhanced overall buyer engagement. Our number of habitual buyers was largely unchanged on a sequential basis at $7 million, an encouraging sign of continued stabilization in this metric. These loyal buyers accounted for 44% of our third quarter GMS, which increased slightly from the prior quarter. It’s important to note that we retained a slightly larger portion of our prior year habitual buyers in the third quarter than in the second quarter.
Our number of repeat buyers grew 3% year-over-year to nearly $37 million, also driven by the previously mentioned markets. Encouragingly, we upgraded more prior year active and lapsed buyers to repeat buyers in the third quarter than in any of the last six quarters. GMS per active buyer on a trailing 12-month basis for the Etsy marketplace continued to stabilize sequentially, but declined 6% year-over-year to $127 in the third quarter. Overall, our GMS per buyer is 25% higher than the third quarter of 2019. As of September 30, we had $1.1 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short- and long-term investments. During the third quarter, we repurchased a total of $297 million in stock under our 2 board authorized repurchase programs, which together totaled $1.6 billion.
So far, in all of 2023, we have repurchased $484 million of our stock or 5.5 million shares and our 2022 $600 million authorization is now complete. Our free cash flow this quarter was a strong $208 million. We continued to convert approximately 90% of our adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow on a trailing 12-month basis as our marketplace operates with minimal capital requirements. Now turning to our outlook. We are working vigorously to deliver growth this holiday season, yet we anticipate that it will be challenging to do so given a multitude of headwinds. These include many of those discussed today, such as pressure on consumer discretionary product spending, fairly cautious external forecast about the holiday season and Etsy’s category mix.
In addition, we are seeing a highly competitive landscape for advertising with some competitors investing without an eye to ROI. To be clear, this is not a game we will play. Etsy’s performance marketing spending models dynamically adjust pulling back when we reach marginal return thresholds. So higher CPCs could naturally reduce our spend for paid traffic. And of course, the world is now unfortunately faced with yet another significant geopolitical conflict, which could have implications for consumer spending. We believe some of these factors contributed to a deceleration in our Etsy Marketplace year-over-year trend line, particularly in the U.S., starting at the end of September and extending into a slightly negative trend line lasting through October.
Last, a reminder that our guidance no longer includes Elo7 and represents a slight decrease to the top line. So please factor that into your models. With a month of negative year-over-year trends and limited visibility to help consumers will behave this upcoming holiday season, we’re doing our best to land the plane with our guidance, which has always been our goal. Our current expectation is that consolidated Q4 GMS would decline in the low single-digit range on a year-over-year basis. However, if trends worsen, that could become a mid-single-digit decline. And if trends improve, GMS could be flat or even slightly up year-over-year. Obviously, with two-third of the quarter left to go and the all-important holiday shopping season having barely begun, it’s tough to call it right now.
We anticipate Q4 take rate to be approximately 20.8%, down slightly on a sequential basis due to normal seasonality. So you can use that to estimate our revenue range for the quarter. Recent expansion of Etsy Payments into new international markets is not expected to impact take rate in Q4 and will likely represent a modest increase for 2024. We are guiding to a consolidated adjusted EBITDA margin of 26% to 27% with seasonally higher marketing spend being the primary driver of the sequential decline, although, of course, consolidated EBITDA dollars are expected to be up sequentially. We plan to increase investments in performance marketing both in the U.S. and internationally, will run select Etsy-funded promotions and invest in a powerful combination of brand visibility that includes TV, digital video, out of home, audio and more.
