Yesterday, Amazon.com quietly launched its latest initiative, an independent brand selling high-end shoes, handbags and accessories. Amazon.com still carries its own, broader selection of these products, while Endless.com offers a boutique-like shopping experience online, following in the footsteps of Zappos (Zappos Couture) and Gap (Piperlime).

That’s where the marketing lesson lies. Amazon.com as a brand and a website can’t be everything to everyone. Its image revolves around bargain basement deals and brown boxes. According to NDP Group, fashion footwear is an $18 billion a year industry, and Jupiter Research put online sales at $2.3 billion for 2006. That’s a huge market to tap into, with plenty of opportunity to move increasingly online, and a large part of that market is looking for an experience Amazon’s website doesn’t offer.

Endless.com reaches out to the well-to-do, high-style shopper with a magazine-like website and customer perks you won’t find at Amazon. Navigation flows from page to page with fades and slides through extensive use of JavaScript and AJAX browser effects. Product lists are spacious with clear photos from multiple angles and editorial-style product descriptions. Stock is shown in real-time just by mousing over a shoe size and moving from product to product doesn’t require a page reload.

The experience perks of Endless over Amazon go much further than a new website design. Every product is backed with a 110% price match guarantee, a 365-day return window, and most boldly, free overnight shipping. A quick check shows many of the products on the site are marked up $20-30 over competitors, which could offset the shipping cost Amazon is absorbing assuming most customers don’t take advantage of the price match guarantee. Amazon is probably the best equipped retailer to offer something like this thanks to the economies of scale their core business gives them with warehousing and shipping.

It’s clear that brand differentiation was the goal here as the only mentions of Amazon.com are buried several clicks into the site on the “About Us” page, and you won’t find an Amazon logo. Creating multiple brands is a method for reaching new markets many companies could take advantage of and not just in the retail industry. A website hosting company, for example, could have one brand which offers budget services for individuals, and another with higher pricing targeting medium-size businesses that value support availability over bargain pricing. Both brands leverage the same infrastructure, equipment and staff while reaching customers they wouldn’t with just one strategy or the other.

If endless.com turns out to be successful, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Amazon.com branch out with even more independent sites for other high-end product lines they carry, such as jewelry, home furnishings, or electronics.