eBay Live Launches In Canada As Platform Races To Catch Up With Live Shopping Rivals
eBay Live launches in Canada as eBay plays catch up with TikTok, Whatnot and other livestream shopping rivals.
Live launched over 3 years ago in the US and has been available for over a year in the UK as well, but eBay has been picking up the pace in the last few months, expanding Live into more categories like Hard Goods, Health and Beauty, and Art and Antiques, and more countries.
After previous launches in Germany in November, Australia in December, and France and Italy earlier this month, eBay live will make its Canadian debut at Fan Expo in Vancouver and the Collectors Supershow in Toronto this week.
"eBay Live brings the energy and fun of live discovery together with the trust eBay is known for,” said Caroline Pougnier, Director of eBay Live, North America. “It gives Canadian buyers a more interactive way to discover great inventory, connect with knowledgeable sellers, and engage with the collecting community — all within eBay’s trusted marketplace.”
eBay's newfound (just before Q4/full year 2025 earnings) sense of urgency about Live shopping likely has more than a little to do with TikTok's recent foray into auctions and reports that TikTok Shop is within striking distance of overtaking eBay in total Gross Merchandise Volume.
Liz Morton
Notably, TikTop Shop's auction initiatives are aimed squarely at the high-end collectibles market that eBay had previously dominated (with ex-eBay Collectibles GM Steve Halupka leading the way.)
In Q3 2025, analytics firm EchoTik estimated TikTok Shop sold ~$19 Billion worth of products globally from July through September, with the US accounting for ~$4 Billion to ~$4.5 Billion of that total, an increase of about 125 percent compared to Q2 2025.
By comparison, eBay reported $20.1 Billion total global GMV for the same period, just barely managing to stay ahead of the social media giant despite devoting significant resources and discounts for users to try to boost usage of eBay Live livestream shopping.
And new research shows that trend continuing with full year 2025 financial results for TikTok expected to hit ~$63B Global GMV with ~$17B of that being from the US.
Meanwhile, WhatNot just reported ~$8 billion in live GMV in 2025, more than doubling year over year, with over 20 million new accounts created on the platform last year alone.
Liz Morton
eBay scrambling to expand Live into more categories and countries now is a stark contrast to their position just a few short months ago at eBay Open 2025, where Pougnier inexplicably encouraged smaller sellers who were interested in livestreaming to use competing sites to get comfortable with live selling and build an audience.
Liz Morton
During the eBay Open Live Seller Panel titled Thriving in Real-Time Commerce, Pougnier told attendees:
Okay, so the next question is when is eBay live going to be open for more Sellers and more categories? And what's required to be eligible?
So our vision of course is to have eBay live be open to all trusted sellers on the platform. We're really keen on building a platform that has the best sellers who are very trusted because a lot can go wrong if you've got a not great or not very ethical seller.
At the moment though the technology is still in its earliest stages and so we're partnering with those who have existing livestreaming experience so that they can help us build the platform and make it ready for a broader audience. We're going to be opening up little by little as the platform gets more mature.
At the moment in order to join, you should have existing livestreaming experience and/or a very active social media community, in addition, of course to fantastic access to inventory.
Even more mind-blowing, when a small seller in the live audience asked how she could get into live selling if she didn't qualify for eBay Live, Pougnier explicitly told the seller she should start by practicing livestreaming and building an audience on other social media sites - an idea the seller had not previously considered before today!
Seller: my question is related to what you were just talking about. So I am a smaller seller. I am dying to get on to the Live platform and as I was applying I realized that I don't have any of the qualifications that you're looking for.
I have 998 followers on TikTok and a very small Instagram. So, what would you recommend for platforms for us that want to get into this business but cannot quite yet get onto eBay?
Caroline: Yeah. So it sounds like you're already doing the work of building a social media following, have you practiced going live on those platforms?
Seller: I have not and I really didn't think about that.
Caroline: I think that's a really good first step because first of all, you get used to being in front of the camera, moderating an audience, you get used how the chat goes. And also you'll find that you're following will grow much faster as you start live on social media platforms.
eBay has a long history of blundering into telling their customers to spend more time on competitor sites, raising questions about whether CEO Jamie Iannone truly understands the competitive landscape the company faces.
Liz Morton
For example, As @unsuckEBAY explained in 2021, continuing to funnel users to Facebook for support, engagement and live shopping seemed like a bad move, especially in light of how StockX took a big bite out of eBay's sneaker business in 2019.
Early last year, eBay did in fact make a deal with Meta, announcing a partnership which allows eBay items to be listed on Facebook Marketplace - but it's important to note that the integration directs the buyer from Facebook to eBay to complete the transaction, so in theory it should be a net gain for eBay rather than a risk of losing existing users to a competitor.
Liz Morton
That being said, it was absolutely wild to hear the General Manager of eBay Live actively encouraging sellers who were apparently too small for eBay to care about to go pay their dues (quite literally in the form of selling fees) and hone their live selling skills elsewhere.
If that small seller followed Pougnier's advice and became successful with live selling by growing a sizeable following on Whatnot, TikTok or Instagram, why in the world would she want to come back groveling for a chance to be let into eBay Live?
eBay is now belatedly reversing course from that monumentally short-sighted position, but one has to wonder how much potential revenue they foolishly handed to their competitors in the meantime.
It would also be interesting to know just how much it's costing eBay to catch up, with generous discounts being offered to buyers and significant incentives offered to sellers - including final value fee discounts, activation rewards, bounties and more, as shown in a recent job ad for an eBay Live Incentive Manager.
One major early hurdle for eBay Live was persistent technical problems that made the user experience inconsistent and, in some cases, practically unusable - like the Elton John Charity Event that turned into an embarrassing debacle with terrible pixelation, extreme lag and buffering distracting and disrupting the event.
Liz Morton
It seems eBay has finally gotten most of the bugs worked out, but after 3 years of technical bottlenecks and squandered opportunities while smaller, scrappy upstart competitors have gained an early foothold in live selling, is eBay Live too late to the party or arriving just in time?
