Where Patrick Byrne goes, trouble follows. And that is just how he likes it. The chief executive of Overstock.com, the American online retailer, is, after all, a fighter. Literally.

Mr Byrne, 46, gave up his ambitions to become a heavyweight boxer in his twenties. He was attracted to fighting by Muhammad Ali, who, with Warren Buffett, the renowned investor, and Milton Friedman, the late, great Harvard economist, features on his list of heroes.

“I realised that only a small handful of guys could make serious money at the top and I wasn’t going to be one of them. I could hit hard, but I could never develop my cardio performance. I finally got my ass kicked in a fight in Miami by a guy who, at the end of it, looked like he was ready to walk out into a GQ photo shoot.”

Since hanging up his gloves, Mr Byrne has followed a circuitous career path through the worlds of business and academia. For the past ten years he has concentrated on building Overstock into one of America’s biggest online retailers, selling liquidated inventory directly to consumers.

A restless man always searching for the next big adventure, Mr Byrne claims not to have leisure pursuits, just interests. Today he is immersed in one of the interests closest to his heart, Worldstock, a fair trade online retailer that he created to help to lift artisan workers in developing countries out of poverty.

He is sitting beneath a palm tree on a tropical island just off the coast of Cartagena in Colombia. There is a stray puppy on his lap and Mr Byrne is sipping milk from a shell, singing the Harry Nilsson hit Coconut. He has just finished examining some ladies’ purses made from recycled plastic food wrappers, created by a group of women on the island, where the people are poor and the local amenities virtually non-existent. He and his Worldstock team believe that they could sell the bags in the United States for $39 to $49 (£24-£30). The women are asking $35 per bag; Mr Byrne thinks $25 — enough to support a family for a week in Colombia — is a fair offer. Even at that price, the margins for Worldstock will be tight, but that does not bother Mr Byrne, for whom the project is a labour of love. “I’m really pleased with what we’ve seen today,” he says.

He launched Worldstock after making a trip to Cambodia shortly after buying Overstock from Robert Brazell, its founder. A motorcycle crash had left him stranded in a remote village, where he noticed that many of the local silversmiths and carpenters were producing high-quality artefacts but had few outlets in which to sell them. Convinced that they could benefit by access to the Overstock model of selling large volumes of unique items, each in relatively small quantities, he set up Worldstock as a division of Overstock to give them an outlet in the US.

Eight years on, Worldstock benefits about 10,000 producers, whose goods are shipped from 35 countries to Mr Byrne’s warehouses in Utah before being dispatched to customers. The artisans receive around half the retail price. “We were doing ‘fair trade’ even before I know there was such a thing,” Mr Byrne says.

Worldstock’s wafer-thin margins means that the organisation, which turns over about $20 million a year, has accumulated a debt of $150,000 since its creation. “It’s the best $150,000 I ever spent,” Mr Byrne says. He hopes Worldstock will break even by Christmas.

Being a supplier for Worldstock means that people like Orlando Paez, who makes decorative lamps in a workshop in Bogotá, can afford to send his two children to university and to train and employ 20 to 30 others who might not otherwise find employment in a country with a jobless rate of more than 11 per cent.

Mr Paez’s Sioux lamps are Worldstock’s bestselling item and Mr Byrne is here to discuss the logistics of increasing his quarterly order from 300 to 900. The lamps sell for $129.99 on Worldstock’s website, with Mr Paez receiving $52. Mr Byrne and his team think they could sell more if they cut the price to $99.99. The question is, can Mr Paez triple production and maintain quality? Mr Byrne, unwilling to sacrifice standards, would prefer to scale back the order if necessary.

In Villa de Leyva, a three-hour drive northeast of Bogotá, Mr Byrne meets Roxanna Congrains, who runs a woodworking business employing six permanent workers, with seasonal employment for fourteen more. She makes exquisite hardwood tables and chairs and is delighted that Worldstock has given her a chance to gain access to the international market.