Adoption doesn’t stall because customers hate digital. It stalls because the old way is still less work.

For a dozen years, the data has said the same thing. And it keeps getting louder.

B2B buyers want digital. They want self-service. They want to do it on their own time.

McKinsey’s B2B Pulse survey calls it the “rule of thirds” — at every stage of the buying journey, a third of buyers want to self-serve digitally. That holds across geography, industry, deal size, and whether it’s a brand-new purchase or the hundredth reorder.

Buyers now use around ten channels in a single purchase. That’s double what it was five years ago.

61% say they’d prefer a rep-free buying experience. Nearly 87% research on their own before they ever talk to a human.

And where B2B companies have actually built for it? eCommerce is now their single largest revenue channel — and has been for four straight years.

So the demand isn’t in question. It hasn’t been for a long time.

And yet.

Many distributors and manufacturers still struggle to achieve greater than single or low-double-digit revenue from digital.

The buyers say they want it. The analysts confirm it. The revenue is there for the companies who get it right.

So where’s the disconnect?

The Inflection Point

Here’s how I think about it.

Every one of your customers sits at an inflection point. On one side is the way they order today. On the other side is the way you want them to order.

And two things are true about that customer.

First, they already know what the old way costs them. They know exactly how long it takes to call your customer service desk. They know how long it takes to email a PO or work their rep. It may not be fast — but it’s known. It’s predictable. And remember: this is their job. Their job is to spend as little time as possible processing orders.

Second, your site is an unknown. And unknowns read as risk. Until proven otherwise, your customer assumes your online channel is more friction, not less. A learning curve is a cost. You’re asking them to spend time now to maybe save time later. Most of them won’t take that bet.

That’s the disconnect. It was never about whether they want digital. It’s that, on day one, the math doesn’t pencil out for them.

But here’s the part that matters most.

The inflection point cuts both ways.

Once a customer learns they can find what they need and place the order themselves, the math flips. Now going online — on their schedule, at whatever hour they choose, without waiting on anyone — is less friction than calling a rep or sending an email.

The exact same channel that started as the high-friction option becomes the low-friction one.

That’s the whole game. Adoption isn’t persuasion. It’s the moment the friction of using your site drops below the friction of picking up the phone.

So the job was never “build digital.” The job is to reduce friction until crossing that line is the obvious choice — and then keep reducing it.

Anything that doesn’t clearly make their life easier won’t get adopted. Not because the technology is bad. Because the math doesn’t work for them yet.

So Where Do You Reduce Friction?

What follows isn’t an all-inclusive list. There are more friction points than I could fit in one post. But these are a good place to start — and they’re the ones I see overlooked most often.

Account Management

This is the big one. So big, it likely gets its own blog or series soon. But for now, let’s just talk about who your customer is.

Before a customer can place a single order, your platform has to be able to match their complexity. And in B2B, your customer isn’t a person. It’s an organization.

Multiple locations. An org hierarchy — local, regional, national. Roles: specifiers, purchasers, approvers, AP contacts. Permissions for each. Contract pricing that varies by division. (The process those roles run — approvals, routing — is its own friction point; more on that in a moment.)

If you can’t match that complexity, your customers can’t use your platform. It’s that simple.

And it goes further than placing an order. Your customers want to manage their own account — add their own users, manage their own ship-to locations, set their own permissions — whenever they decide to log in. Force them to call your desk every time they need to add a user or change a location, and you haven’t removed friction. You’ve added it, at the exact moment you needed it gone.

This is where platform selection becomes critical. Until your platform can account for this, the friction of your site stays higher than the offline version. Permanently. The customers have told you what they want. The real question is whether you’ve chosen a platform — and built the path — that can actually deliver it.

Offline Order History

Here’s one almost nobody talks about. And it’s pure friction math: Offline and historical order history. But WAY too often this subject is on the table during implementation only to be shuttered or reduced in scope, due to time or cost.

But, it’s a quick win for customers and reinforces the value you place on your history with them.

From the customers’ lens: Launch a store with zero customer history in it, and you’ve manufactured a friction point on day one. A loyal customer logs in to an empty store and has to rebuild, from scratch, everything they already knew how to order.

Now, context matters. If you’re a pure OEM with almost no reorder activity, this is less of an issue. But if a meaningful share of your business is reorders — and for most distributors it is — this is enormous.

Bringing in the last three years of a customer’s offline orders at launch lets them walk in and immediately reorder what they’ve always ordered. Instantly familiar. Instantly lower friction.

Two questions make this real:

If (re)launching a new store, can a customer see their historical offline orders — the ones placed before you launched?

And can they see the offline orders placed after launch — the ones Sales or Customer Service is still keying in manually?

Yes, this often means more integration. Real work, real cost — I won’t pretend otherwise. But few friction reducers carry a higher payoff than putting a customer’s own order history right in front of them.

Customer Data

The low-hanging fruit here is obvious. Contract pricing surfaced correctly. Accurate availability. Get those wrong and the customer can’t trust what they see — so they go verify it offline, and friction just went up, not down.

But the real opportunity in customer data goes deeper than pricing and inventory. It’s about shaping the experience around who the customer actually is.

B2B customers aren’t one audience. They buy differently. They’re segmented differently. A customer in one market needs a different catalog, different terms, and a different path than a customer in another — and the more markets and segments you serve, the more this matters. This is especially true for distributors carrying multiple lines, and for manufacturers selling across multiple markets and segments — which, in B2B, is more often the rule than the exception.

To accommodate that, two things have to be true. You have to be able to capture and hold the data that tells you who a customer is and how they buy — the fields, the structure, the inlets to collect it. And you have to be able to act on it on the front end, shaping what that customer sees and how they move through the site.

That’s the difference between data as a friction point and data as a friction opportunity. Get it wrong and every customer gets the same generic experience, and the ones who don’t fit it reach for the phone. Get it right and the site starts to feel like it was built for them specifically.

That’s the payoff.

Order Workflows

This one travels closely with account management — so closely it’s worth being clear about the line between them. Account management is about who the customer is: their locations, their hierarchy, the roles that exist inside their organization. Order workflows are about what happens when that structure actually tries to place an order.

Because in B2B, placing an order is rarely one person clicking “buy.” Inside a single customer’s location you may have buyers and approvers. Above them, regions and divisions, each with their own rules. An order placed by a buyer may need to route to an approver — and which approver, at what threshold, depends entirely on that customer’s structure.

If your platform can’t model that approval process the way the customer actually runs it, you’ve done worse than fail to help. You’ve forced their internal process to break against your site — and that sends them straight back to the channel where the process already works.

It also means surfacing the right fulfillment options for that specific customer — the locations, methods, and terms that apply to them, not a generic set. (I went deep on the order itself — status, backorders, substitutions, reorders — last issue, so I won’t repeat it here.

The goal across all of it is the same: let the customer build their own purchasing process, inside the workflow their organization actually uses.

The Real Question

Your customers aren’t anti-digital. They’re just strapped for time.

They’re doing the math — every order, on their own time. And until they know better, for a lot of them, the old way still wins.

The demand was never the question. The analysts settled that years ago. The question is whether your digital experience clearly beats the way they order today.

Customers have told you what they want. Aligning the platform(s) and the path helps move your digital experience beyond the inflection point: Customers don’t have to wonder, they know where the time savings occurs.

Where are you still forcing your best customers to do the math?

Need help in finding the friction points, we’re here to help. Drop a line (info@b2b-squared.com) or book a free consultation.