Multi-marketplace advertising strategy opens up the business map of the European market for Little Rainy

Little Rainy is a business-to-customer (B2C) international apparel retailer that primarily sells in the women's fashion category. They started selling products in the Amazon store in the UK in 2017 and quickly expanded to multi-marketplace business operations throughout Europe within one year.

Little Rainy used Sponsored Products from the beginning, then launched advertising campaigns for multiple European marketplaces while actively experimenting with a variety of Amazon Ads products such as Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display and Stores.

One of Little Rainy’s key business strategies is multi-marketplace advertising. Little Rainy has formulated a European multi-marketplace advertising goal and strategy through a “confidence index” (a checklist created by Little Rainy) and continuously optimises advertising performance.

Multi-marketplace advertising goals in Europe

Increase impressions

The most important goal of self-service sponsored ads is to help customers discover ASINs. This is especially important for new products.

Combined with promotions

When products have promotions such as vouchers or Lightning Deals, Little Rainy wants to give these products the maximum opportunity to be displayed. Also, ads can be used with promotions to maximize business goals, especially during peak seasons.

On Black Friday in 2020, Little Rainy was able to sell 3.7X its average daily sales of a knit sweater product, by combining a Lightning Deal with Sponsored ads.1

Build brands

Although Little Rainy lacks experience in brand advertising operations, they’ve been able to build brands and brand image throughout Europe through advertising for a long time.

“Amazon Ads helps customers discover products and helps us find keywords that are highly relevant to our products and drive product conversions. Whether it's Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands, it's an important tool for sellers, especially on the road of business transformation and branding development.”

– Michèle, Brand Manager, Little Rainy

Multi-marketplace advertising strategy in Europe

Localised presentation

Another important step is to localise for consumers. Little Rainy recruits specialists in different languages for the marketplaces to improve the description of their products in the product detail pages after analysing similar product descriptions, local consumer reviews and terms from other local marketing websites.

Budget allocation

Little Rainy allocates the budget from the bottom up, according to the specific sales of each product. It is generally divided into regular months and promotion months, with regular monthly advertising accounting for 5% of ad-attributed sales and increasing to 7% ad-attributed sales for big promotion months, such as the month of Prime Day and peak festive season, to determine the budget allocation for multiple sites.2

Real-time adjustment

The women’s fashion apparel category in which Little Rainy competes in is characterized by versatility, obvious seasonality and fast trend updates. Therefore, it’s important to pay attention to industry trends and adjust the advertising of seasonal products. At the same time, multi-marketplace business operations require constant testing, supervision, and adjustment – so Little Rainy applies popular products from the UK and Germany and tests successful advertising strategies in these marketplaces and actively adjusts as needed.

Develop advertising products through the “confidence index”

At the beginning of development, Little Rainy will give different products a “confidence index”. For example, a knit sweater has always been a hot product. In 2020, Little Rainy checked the Best Seller list and as a result of the trends on such list a, launched its stacked collar-style and printed-style sweaters at very competitive prices. The confidence index of such a product is very high, so as soon as it is launched (after the product is on the shelf and Fulfilment by Amazon arrives), a Sponsored Products ad is quickly started to help customers discover products and bring orders, to help try and make it a new hot seller.

For new categories of products, Little Rainy is conservative about the confidence index. For example, when pants were first introduced, they didn’t start advertising immediately, instead waiting until after the sales operation was stable for a period of time. In the process, the linkage of different sites gives a good reference: for example, continuous sales of new products within the Amazon store in UK and Germany represent positive feedback. The problem of small sites may be lack of traffic, so it can be beneficial to advertise on these sites. If FBA inventory is sufficient, consider expanding to additional marketplaces.

Little Rainy’s confidence index rating table

  • Adequate FBA inventory
  • Available in colours and sizes
  • Continuous sales
  • Ranked around 5,000-10,000 in major categories
  • Has reviews and a rating of 3.5 or above
  • Eligibility for Advertising Ready Products
  • Detail pages are optimised, including product descriptions, A+ content, etc.

European site case

How to use search term reports


1. Discover effective generic keywords:
Generally, Little Rainy runs automatic ads for two weeks, and then analyses the search term report and finds the most relevant word types in four categories: colour, style, size and fit. Then, they look at a combination of these four types of generic keywords, such as colour plus style; colour plus size; and more fabrics and seasons. These words can also be applied in manual ads or used for campaign groupings.

2. Optimise Product Detail pages
For next steps, add the relevant query terms above to the product detail page, analyse the positive and negative reviews from customers and finally confirm the optimisation of the detail page copy.

For Little Rainy, ad campaign optimization began at the end of December 2020. By the end of March 2021, the conversion rate increased by 1.17%, and the average daily orders increased by 3X.3

Amazon cross-site advertising operational tools

  • Amazon Ads Manager Account
    You can link specific accounts from multiple countries to a single regional administrator account, making it easy to view and manage them with just one log-in.
  • Establish International Commodity Information (BIL)
    Free assistance for you to quickly create multi-site ASINs. A machine translation engine optimised for selected information can automatically translate from one site to another.

1, 2, 3 Little Rainy, 2020, China