PEOPLink is a non-profit online marketplace enabling consumers to purchase directly from artisans and small and medium businesses all over the world. In its initial stages, PEOPLink worked mainly with artisans and from 1996-2000, trained 55 trading partners in 22 countries representing up to 100,000 handicraft artisans. These partners learned how to capture and publish digital images and to maintain simple web pages to promote their craft products. Aside from artisans, PEOPLink also now supports a wide range of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and business networks in 42 countries.

PEOPLink collaborated with programmers working from Albania, Siberia, Ukraine, India, Ecuador, and Ireland to develop the CatGen (for "catalog generator") e-commerce platform.CatGen enables any enterprise anywhere to create and maintain their own web catalog. It also provides an "out of the box" solution for business networks to aggregate many catalogs into an on-line marketplace of sufficient scale to generate the visibility and credibility necessary for successful e-commerce. By special arrangement the CatGen platform has an applications programming interface to eBay as well as complementary components to facilitate payment and consolidated shipping for international transactions.

PEOPLink encourages communication with artisan groups and also have Live Chat capability ontheir website.

Economic Development

According to PEOPLink, SMEs are the main generators of income and employment especially in emerging economies. Global e-commerce is brings together the internet and international trade. PEOPLink believes that the development challenge of this century is to enable SMEs to benefit from offering their creativity and productivity in a global marketplace.