Where To Buy Car Paint?

If you are looking to purchase car paint for your shop or project you have come to the right place.  We offer a wide variety of custom paints at incredible savings.  There are a lot of options to purchase automotive paint both online and locally and the right place to buy really depends on what you are trying to achieve and the amount of time you have to execute your project.  We put together this post to share facts that may help you make the right decision for your purchase.  Read below to learn more.

When deciding where you should purchase your paint you need to ask yourself some questions to arrive at the best solution.

Do you need a factory matched paint or is a nice custom paint acceptable?

Factory paints would be those that come on new vehicles from the factory.  Factory matched paints are required if you are just doing collision repair to a portion of your vehicle.  If you are painting you whole vehicle or doing an “overall” to use the industry term you have more options for colors and suppliers.  Paints that are not designed to match a factory vehicle are said to be custom paints.  Custom paints range from subtle to radical to suit all taste of automotive enthusiasts.  Basides offering the possibility of a unique color,  in many cases custom paints are actually LESS than factory colors of comparable quality.  There is a great expense to matching, maintaining, and presenting 60,000+ paint color formulas needed to meet market demands for the collision repair market place.  Companies like us (urekem) can concentrate on a smaller attractive pallette of colors that keeps costs down.  If you do require a factory matched paint it is best to buy locally where your local dealer can make sure you have the right “variant”, or color shade for your color.  Believe it or not there are often more than one color for each color code on your car.

Do you have time to plan ahead?

If you need your paint within a few days buying locally at an auto paint dealer is normally your only option.  If you can wait a little longest to purchase paint online you can usually save a lot of money.  Generally this is not a problem for customers doing restoration projects.  When buying online make sure the company has good reviews from neutral 3rd party sites.  Testimonials on sites that are selling the product is generally not a good source for paint reviews as the vendor will only choose the best testimonials to display.  We refer customers to our ebay reviews which show a true picture of our performance in shipping, product performance and services in general.  Also make sure you purchase from someone that has a proven track record for shipping fast and offers a reasonable return policy.

Do you need to see the color before you purchase?

Seems like a silly question I know but there are different ways to “see” the color and deciding which way is acceptable to you is important.  Most commonly colors are presented for purchase through color chip books or “color charts”.   Some online vendors do not have color charts and depend solely on photos of the product posted to the internet to represent the color.  The problem with this approach is that it is very difficult to capture the true brilliance on many colors with a camera and there is the problem with monitor settings and so forth making it difficult to capture and display color consistently.  Believe me, we know how hard it is to display color having sold color for many years without color chips.  We’re proud to say we know offer real color chips in a wide range of colors.  It’s best to purchase from vendors with hand sprayed color chips.  Some manufacturers will take short cuts to save money by making their color charts from a printing process rather than actual paint.  It may save a few bucks per chart but often is not as good a representation as a chip sprayed from real paint.  It’s better to pay a few dollars more to get the real thing.