December 14, 2000 | Read Time: 3 minutes
By NICOLE WALLACE
Fair-trade charities are taking different approaches to harnessing the power of the Internet to promote the sale of handicrafts made by artisans in developing countries.
Daniel Salcedo envisions a future in which craftspeople use the Internet to sell their products directly to consumers.
In 1995, he founded Peoplink (http://www.peoplink.org), a nonprofit organization based in Kensington, Md., to sell crafts from artisans around the world online.
Quickly, Mr. Salcedo recalls, he began to see that technology could do more to improve the lives of the artisans if they could take advantage of the Internet themselves.
“There’s no reason why an artisan producing an article can’t put it up for sale and get 95 percent of the revenue minus a little bit for shipping and customs — dramatically raising the portion of the final price that they get for their work,” he says.
Although Peoplink continues to sell crafts through its Web site, the charity’s primary focus has shifted to helping artisan groups learn how to develop their own Web sites. The groups that Peoplink has worked with do not yet use their sites to sell directly to customers or individual retailers, but they report an increase in the number of wholesalers contacting them as a result of the sites.
In January, Peoplink will unveil its CatGen (short for Catalog Generator) software, which will allow any small business to create a Web site or printed catalogs. The CatGen software will be available free online (http://www.catgen.com), and Web hosting for sites with fewer than 25 products will also be free. Peoplink plans to support the project by offering fee-based services — such as space for more than 25 products and payment-processing services — to complement the basic CatGen services.
More-established fair-trade charities are also embracing the Internet — but more cautiously.
SERRV International (http://www.serrv.org), in New Windsor, Md., has been selling crafts and other handmade items on its Web site for the past year, and although online transactions make up only a small percentage of sales, the group is seeing an increasing number of orders come in through the Web.
Brian Bache, SERRV’s marketing director, estimates that in the last three months, 1,000 of the organization’s 20,000 orders have come in online.
Mr. Bache is enthusiastic about the Internet’s potential, but for the foreseeable future, he sees an important role for intermediary charities like SERRV.
“It is extremely difficult at the moment to get large quantities from the hilltops and the rural villages of Thailand or remote parts of Africa, even when you’re ordering a hundred or a thousand of these things. For a consumer to get that in any kind of timely fashion would be problematic in the short term.”
Ten Thousand Villages (http://www.villages.ca), a charity in Akron, Pa., has decided not to sell its products online, but instead to emphasize the Internet’s educational aspect.
“We have invested a lot of time and resources into building up our store network, so instead we use the Internet to educate people about the products, about the artisans, about the countries that we represent,” explains the group’s media coordinator, Juanita Fox.
