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EthicVillage sells traditional instruments and other handmade items from around the world at its Paris shop

PARIS, France (CNN) -- Using the Web to fight poverty is a noble ambition, and it's the principle behind PlaNetFinance -- a French finance house that specializes in lending small sums to small businesses and entrepreneurs that other banks won't touch.

The concept is called microfinance, but PlaNetFinance has taken it a step further -- investing in another French venture that eventually wants to use the Web to sell products and goods produced by other microfinance projects.

The original idea behind EthicVillage.com was to use the Internet to find buyers for traditional ethnic handicrafts from around the world -- products that might disappear altogether if wider markets aren't found.

But following the dot-com slump, the company has gone in a more traditional direction, opening a storefront in Paris. PlaNetFinance, which has invested $200,000 in the project, sanctioned the decision to delay the online launch.

"In the last year it was just the crash of so many e-commerce ventures, we thought it would be not really wise to start a new e-commerce venture before proving that we could overcome all the challenges that we have to with such a project," says Arnaud Ventura of PlaNetFinance. "That's why we decided to postpone the Web and the e-commerce selling to a later stage."

For Christine Estager, who quit her job as a risk manager at J.P. Morgan to become a director of EthicVillage, that delay was a wise decision -- one that forced the company to concentrate on profitability.

"We were more oriented with an Internet project selling goods, and luckily for us the wave passed," says Estager, adding that the challenge now is "to prove that our model, our project, will not lose any money."

Currently EthicVillage is breaking even with sales of around $100,000 after just five months of trading.

That's a reflection of the growing interest in so-called "socially conscious" goods -- a market estimated to be worth around a billion dollars annually.

Sourcing goods from Africa to Indonesia, chief buyer Patrick Chauvet says he believes many of his producers could not continue without the company's support, helping to preserve traditional crafts and skills that could otherwise be lost.

EthicVillage has toned down its plans to use the Web as a selling tool, partnering with existing e-commerce sites like alapage.com and seeking contracts with traditional retail outlets like Galaries Lafayette and luxury goods group LVMH. Its own Web site remains under construction.

"In fact the Internet will come, and it is coming, but we don't have huge money to spend to build the Web site," says Estager. "We have a partner who offered to build this freely. ... This partner is a small Web agency."

In the meantime, EthicVillage is hoping to expand its retail space with a larger store -- a cheaper alternative to investing in the Internet. EthicVillage and PlaNetFinance may be helping to fight poverty, but it will be a while before the power of the Internet plays its full part in winning the war.

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