Worth the wait: how a three-second check lifted conversion

Customers weren’t confident the paint pen would actually match their car.

PaintNuts sells touch-up paint mixed to match a customer’s specific vehicle. Customers enter their registration; PaintNuts identifies the vehicle and matches the correct factory paint colour. Simple, and yet a lot of tech goes into this system.

The biggest barrier is trust. Customers want to know that the paint they order will genuinely match their car.
We already knew this was a sensitive part of the journey. An earlier version of the registration lookup displayed a broad colour description. For example, “blue” for a Midnight Blue vehicle. Rather than reassuring customers, this made the result look less accurate. Removing it ended up increasing the conversion rate by 4.7%.
After that change, however, the lookup gave customers very little indication of how the match was being made. They entered their registration and immediately received a result. We wanted to find out whether making the matching process more visible would give customers more confidence in the result.

We tested whether showing the matching process would increase trust.

Rather than giving customers more information about the colour itself, we focused on showing the steps PaintNuts takes to identify the correct paint.
Our hypothesis was simple:
If customers can see that their vehicle and paint details are being checked, they will have more confidence in the match and be more likely to order.

This meant deliberately making the lookup feel slightly less instant.

We introduced a short loading sequence between entering the registration and displaying the vehicle result. The aim wasn’t to create artificial delay, but to communicate what was happening during the matching process. Transactional conversion rate was our primary metric, with revenue per visitor and average order value used to understand the commercial impact.

We added a short three-step matching sequence and tested it against the existing lookup.

After a customer submitted their registration, the test version displayed three messages:

• Cross-checking vehicle records
• Identifying the factory colour code
• Matching the correct paint formula

The sequence lasted around three seconds before displaying the usual confirmation.
Nothing about the underlying lookup or matching process changed. The only difference was that customers could now see what was being checked.
We ran the change as a 50/50 A/B test across the site on both mobile and desktop.

The main question was whether more customers completed an order.

Our primary measure was transactional conversion rate.

We also monitored:

• Revenue per visitor – to measure the overall commercial impact.
• Average order value – to check whether any increase in conversion was being offset by changes in basket value.

We also independently checked the statistical significance of the result using a two-sided Z-test rather than relying solely on the testing platform.

Conversion rate increased by 9.13%.

The test produced a clear improvement:
Conversion rate: +9.13%
Revenue per visitor: +9.97%
Average order value: broadly unchanged
Testing platform confidence: 99.4%

Because average order value remained stable, the revenue increase came from more visitors completing an order rather than customers simply spending more.
Following the test, the new lookup sequence was built permanently into the PaintNuts website.
More importantly, the test gave us a useful wider insight: for PaintNuts, showing customers how the match is being made can be more persuasive than simply giving them the answer faster.

That gives us a clear principle to test elsewhere in the customer journey: identify the points where customers need reassurance, then test whether making the expertise or process behind the product more visible helps them move forward.