The Ecommerce Technology You Need To Sell Mixed Paint Online

If you’re reading this from the UK, the word ‘magnolia’ probably transports you back to your childhood home, where the non-white-non-yellow colour was splashed all over your walls. After being a household staple for a few decades, magnolia’s heyday came to an abrupt end, as consumers began to demand higher levels of customisation and personalisation from their paints. 

As this need intensified, DIY and home improvement retailers – such as B&Q – began to offer custom mixed paints which have only been available to purchase in-store, until now.

Obviously this has been a big problem for retailers, with the majority of consumers preferring to shop online these days. DIY retailers want a way to sell their full paint range online, but lack the flexibility in their back-end systems to enable this discovery experience. 

Let us explain why… 

Retailer Challenge: Managing an Extraordinary Number of Custom Mixed Paint SKUs

The challenge that many retailers have with selling mixed paint online is that they can't practically create the phenomenal number of potential SKUs in their back-end systems. When you add up the colour options, finishes and can sizes, there could be well over half a million options - possibly exceeding the rest of the product catalogue. 

Even if this number of SKUs were created, it would be a terrible user experience to surface them through a conventional product listing page (PLP / category page) - nobody wants to scroll through 50,000 pages of results!

Shopper Challenge: Finding the Exact Paint Shade Amongst 500,000+ Products

A traditional product listing page doesn’t work when you have hundreds of thousands of paint products to merchandise. Shoppers need a way to navigate and search the vast quantity of products quickly. They also need a way to visualise shades of paint that are only marginally different in a really visual and intuitive way – something that would increase purchase confidence.

Technology to Sell Mixed Paint Successfully Online

At Hullabalook, one of many things we do is build tools that help retailers sell paint online more effectively. 

Example: B&Q’s Paint Mixing Tool

B&Q had no issues selling their mixed-to-order paint in-store. But with so much data associated with the range, they didn’t have a practical solution (or the in-house capabilities) to sell these paints online.

There are thousands of shades available across B&Q’s several paint ranges, so they needed a way to help shoppers explore and purchase the perfect shade for their homes. 

We worked with the team to develop the Paint Mixing tool.

Here’s how it works:

• Select a colour group (or type a colour into the search bar if you already know what you want).
• Rank the results by shade (ranging from dark to light) and by brand.
• The grid instantly sorts the entire catalogue & surfaces the best matching paint colours at the top – no endless scrolling required! 
• Easily browse and compare options. Hullabalook’s technology renders each paint shade onto the walls of photorealistic images to aid visualisation.
• Once you’ve found a shade you like, view all of the different paint products available for that shade in just a few clicks.

The Paint Mixing experience has been incredibly successful in its first year. The fact it’s been nominated for a Retail Week award demonstrates the impact it has had.

You can also check out this technology on Mr.Bricolage's website.

‘Mix’ Things Up – Implement New Tech To Improve Findability

Are you still relying on the same traditional navigation to sell your paint products online? Would you like to offer custom mixed paint online but are having challenges making that work with your back-end?

If so, ‘mix’ things up a bit! Hullabalook technology pays for itself, and then some. Implement it into your ecommerce website to see an uplift in conversion rate, whether you’re selling paint, or other products too.