If there’s one thing small business owners have done over the past several years, it’s learn to adapt and innovate. The latest pivot among Peterborough’s retailers is responding to the customer demand for live shopping.
An emerging marketing strategy, live shopping — also known as live selling — is a combination of e-commerce and a home shopping TV channel. Over a livestream, a host will present products and respond to questions and comments so viewers can buy in real time. Live selling increased by 76 per cent since the pandemic, and while standard e-commerce websites typically convert at two to three per cent, live selling often sees nine to 30 per cent conversion.
According to Lisa Couture, owner of Couture Candy PTBO, the success of live selling comes from the combination of online shopping convenience with the experience of purchasing from a brick-and-mortar small business.
“When people come into my store, the number one question is ‘What’s your favourite candy?’ or ‘Why did you start a candy business?'” Couture says. “When you’re live, you can talk to people about your ‘why.’ Nobody cares what the CEO of a giant candy company did before, but in a small business, we have a ‘why’ behind our brand. To have a conversation with 30, 18, or 54 people online about it really curates that connection almost immediately.”
Couture was introduced to live selling in the fall of 2024 as she was closing her second Couture Candy PTBO location. At the time, she was noticing how the economy and rising cost of living were affecting how customers were spending money in the store.
“I was on TikTok and I just watched this woman in Asia live selling clothing and jewellery, and she wasn’t doing anything crazy. She was just pulling it out of the box, putting it back in the box, pushing it to the side, then grabbing another one. The next day I read that she had made a million dollars in a matter of minutes,” Couture says, adding that while she couldn’t find any livestreams in Canada, she began watching them from candy stores in the U.K. and U.S.
VIDEO: Couture Candy PTBO Live Selling on Instagram
“Right then and there I thought ‘This is going to be my second location,'” Couture says. “My quote-unquote second location would be this live selling, and it was the very next day I tried it for the first time.”
Couture says that while she remembers that first “live” only converting to a few sales, there was so much engagement that she felt she was just talking to a group of friends.
“People have just changed the way that they’re able to shop, and they don’t have time to go and stroll downtown so we’re seeing foot traffic on the decline,” she says. “What it could take to make X amount of dollars in a day, I could make in one online order. I may only have 80 or 90 people watching my live, but imagine the sales you would make if 80 or 90 people came into your shop (at the same time). The odds of that happening are so few and far between, but for me, it happens several times a week on my lives.”
That’s why in January, Couture Candy PTBO switched from a traditional storefront to sell live full-time with at least two TikTok and Instagram lives per week on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. This business model allows Couture to have a more flexible schedule while raising her young kids and can result in more sales in the same amount of time (or less) working.
“I honestly just can’t believe how tremendously it’s helped my business,” Couture says about live selling. “It could be the resurgence that small businesses need right now.”
Couture Candy PTBO was featured in a June 2025 report from TikTok on the platform’s economic impact in Canada, which noted that some of her twice-weekly TikTok Live shopping events have produced 50 sales in a single night.
VIDEO: Live Shopping Replay + Styling Tips – DJC Modern Apparel
For Nancy Wiskel, owner of DJC Modern Apparel, it was this draw that inspired her to begin doing lives every other week since the end of January. Wiskel was looking for new ways to connect with her audience and when she saw that Couture Candy PTBO had gone entirely live, she contemplated if live selling would be beneficial for her business as well.
Wiskel says she had “mixed feelings” after hosting a live on social media last year but, after doing some research, she found the live selling platform LiveMeUp, an add-on for her Shopify website at djclothing.ca. The program allows her to break the lives down into clips for social media and automatically uploads the full live to her website, so it can be forever available. With this format, she says she easily doubles or even triples the views through replays.
“I’ve noticed we only get one or two purchases through the live, but the week following, the store is noticeably busier,” Wiskel says. “Clothes can be a bit of a difficult purchase sometimes online, just with the fit and feel, so when they’re in store it gives us that chance to interact with customers a little more. I’ve been really surprised at how many people have mentioned to me, ‘Oh, I saw this on the live.’ It’s just another point of contact and another conversation that you can have with someone.”
Wiskel says livestreaming also allows sellers to speak more “personally” about an item in a way that can’t be done through a simple social media post.
“Especially if you have some interesting products that require more knowledge to talk about, I think a live would be really valuable because some products or some services don’t necessarily translate through a photo,” she explains. “When an audience sees you get super excited about something or about some feature, then it makes them excited as well.”
After many people reached out to ask questions, Couture decided to launch one-on-one consultations to help other small business owners overcome their doubts and get the most from live selling.
“I think my biggest advice is that going live works best when you treat it like opening your store door, not like posting online,” Couture says. “It’s not curated, there’s no trending sound, you don’t need to put the text on screen — you’re just opening your store door and whatever comes in, comes in.”
“I think that really resonates with them (small business owners) because they already do that every day. They unlock the door and welcome the world into their store, and when you press that ‘go live’ button, to me, it’s the same experience — just maybe 100 people will show up!”
While Wiskel says, in her opinion, live selling will stick around a while, even if the formats change, she does see the brick-and-mortar storefront as being a place to begin to build an audience for the livestreams. She says the benefit for her is how the two approaches complement each other.
“It (the brick-and-mortar store) is a way that people get to know you and get to know your inventory, so I think it would be hard to just start from scratch live selling. I think you do need to have a good customer base to begin,” she says.
“I think people like to get that information, see things that they maybe wouldn’t have thought of on their own, and then they can come into the store and touch and feel and try on. I think for my business, it’s important to have the brick-and-mortar at least for a while.”
As for Couture, she agrees that live selling is here to stay and, given that she has new customers finding her store every single day, sees it as a great opportunity for small business retailers.
“This is definitely one way that small business can win over big business because you’re connected to the person who bears that brand,” says Couture. “I just think it can be something so magical for small business.”
With Courture’s move to a full-time live selling business model, Courture Candy at 386 George Street North in downtown Peterborough is no longer a traditional storefront. Instead, the space is now a live selling studio and fulfillment hub, and is only open at limited times for local online order pick-ups and special shopping events. For more information and to order online, visit couturecandyptbo.ca.
