The scoreline was not the only thing on Brian McBride’s mind as he watched Celtic play Rapid Vienna last night. The managing director of Amazon.co.uk has goals of his own to worry about — such as boosting the company’s internet presence in the burgeoning fashion, footwear and accessories market. That is why Amazon yesterday launched Javari.co.uk, a website selling handbags and shoes.

Amazon has been rapidly expanding the products it stocks — it now sells jewellery, electricals and furniture, for example, as well as the CDs and books that made it famous. More than 40 per cent of its British sales are now made up of such non-core items, reflecting Mr McBride’s determination, since he arrived at the company in 2006, to preserve Amazon’s dominance of the online market. It now accounts for 40 per cent of the traffic that goes to British online retailers.

His CV makes uncomfortable reading for retailers who still set store by bricks, mortar and an intimate knowledge of the shop floor: after 25 years in IT, including a stint as the North European vice-president of Dell, he was the UK managing director of T-Mobile.

In launching the latest venture, Mr McBride, 53, admits that selling footwear and handbags has proved difficult for Amazon. “People shop differently for shoes and bags”, he said. “They want to zoom in on the stitching and the details. It is not like searching for a book or a CD.”

Across the industry, sales of accessories online increased 30.5 per cent last month, year-on-year, while footwear rose 16.1 per cent. Asos, the online fashion website, underlined the attractiveness of the market this week when it revealed that its sales had risen 47 per cent over the summer.

Javari is a British cousin of Endless.com, a footwear and bag site that Amazon owns in America. Perhaps unfortunately for Mr McBride, the Endless.co.uk domain name belongs to a software consultant in Yorkshire, who told The Times yesterday that he had received offers for the name but not, as far as he knew, from Amazon.

Amazon bought Zappos, the successful American footwear and fashion website, this summer in a $850 million deal. But Mr McBride has no plans to introduce it to Britain. “We want to build the Javari brand and see if it works. I’m hoping that [Javari] will be enough in the medium term,” he said.

Mr McBride studied economic history at Glasgow University and lives in Camberley, Surrey, with his wife and two daughters.

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