'It's like a mall': New online market helps Alta. small businesses sell their goods

A new market has launched online to help small businesses keep their sales up during the pandemic.

The Alberta Chambers of Commerce has introduced the Chamber Market, a tool that local sellers and makers can use to sell their goods on top of the in-person markets.

“We strictly only used to do farmers markets,” Heidi Mirander, the owner of Andys Beef Jerky, said.

However, Mirander moved their business online to help stay afloat. She said 70 per cent of their sales came from online at the height of the pandemic and 30 per cent from live markets.

“We were very fortunate as a small business that we were able to keep our doors open.”

“Albertans love to support local and for good reason because when they support local they have a very prosperous community,” Ken Kobly, president and CEO of Alberta Chambers of Commerce, added.

Roughly 67 cents of every dollar spent in a community stays in that community, Kobly said.

Lifelong visual artist Trish McIssac said when she retired from teaching she decided to go back to school and become a full-time artist. What she wasn’t ready for was marketing her work.

“We’re not very tech savvy, we’re learning, but sometimes Facebook, the complexities of the algorithms just get a bit too much and all we want to do really is create art and somebody please come and buy it,” she laughed.

McIssac told CTV News the market was the “missing link” she needed to be able to spend her “time creating.”

Plus, “You get a lot more traffic, sometimes even more than you do at a live market,” Mirander added.

“It’s like a mall, but it’s online.”

According to Kobly, hundreds of Alberta businesses are ready to be onboarded and the market will stay up for the foreseeable future.

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