Is B2B Friction Costing You Customers? Our New Research Reveals the Top 5 Deal-Breakers

Your B2B buyers now operate with the same high expectations they have as consumers. They are digital-natives who demand intuitive, autonomous, and fast purchasing processes. Yet, many B2B companies still run on outdated legacy systems that create frustrating and unnecessary hurdles. This gap between buyer expectation and business reality creates friction and pushes your customers toward competitors who are simply easier to do business with.

To quantify the real-world impact of this friction, we at NETCONOMY, along with our partner Contentful, surveyed 900 senior B2B buyers and procurement decision-makers across Europe and published the 2025 B2B Buyer Benchmark Report. We wanted to move beyond assumptions and identify the specific pain points that slow down business.

Here are the top five friction factors we identified, and what you can do about them:

1. Lack of pricing transparency (39%)
2. Time-consuming reordering (35%)
3. Complicated Approval Processes (34%)
4. Hard-to-Navigate Portals (33%)
5. Slow Vendor Response Times (24%)
6. How to eliminate friction from your buying journey

1. Lack of Pricing Transparency (39%)

Opaque pricing is the single most frustrating part of the B2B buying experience. Cited by nearly four out of ten buyers, hiding costs behind a “contact us for a quote” form is a major deal-breaker in an era where information is instant.

Buyers are tasked with evaluating options quickly. They need to budget efficiently. When they don’t see the price, they can’t move forward. This antiquated process forces them into a lengthy sales cycle they would rather avoid, especially when our research shows 84% of buyers consider digital self-service critical when choosing a vendor.

The common objection is that B2B pricing models – with their customer-specific discounts and complex contracts – are too complicated to display online. This is no longer true. Modern commerce platforms are engineered to handle these intricate pricing rules in real time.

The technology exists today to connect your ERP and sales systems to your front-end portal, delivering personalized and accurate pricing to every logged-in user. The alternative is to remain a black box and risk losing customers to a competitor who chooses to be transparent.

2. Time-Consuming Reordering (35%)

One-third of all B2B buyers are frustrated by how long it takes to place a repeat order. Many buyers place frequent, multi-line orders for essential materials, and forcing them to manually rebuild carts is an expensive waste of time.

This problem is magnified when you consider that over half of the buyers we surveyed hold senior or C-level positions. Their time is a strategic asset. Wasting it on repetitive administrative tasks creates a poor overall experience and communicates a lack of respect for their priorities.

When a competitor offers one-click reordering, saved templates, or automated replenishment, they are not just offering convenience. They are offering a smarter way to do business.

3. Complicated Approval Processes (34%)

Manual approval processes cripple procurement teams. Highlighted as a major bottleneck by 34% of respondents, a single purchase in a large organization can require sign-offs from multiple departments, from procurement to finance to compliance.

When this process relies on a complicated chain of emails and follow-up calls, it becomes slow, opaque, and prone to error. This friction delays critical projects. It stalls strategic initiatives.

For buyers in highly regulated industries like Aerospace and Defense or Energy, streamlined, multi-stage approval workflows are a core requirement for operating with speed and control.

4. Hard-to-Navigate Portals (33%)

Your buyers get real-time delivery notifications and intuitive interfaces in their personal lives. Then, they log into your B2B portal and feel like they have traveled back to 2010.

A third of all buyers report that convoluted portals are a significant source of friction. A clunky, unintuitive interface frustrates your users and communicates that your company is outdated and difficult to work with.

Your customer portal is a direct reflection of your business. If it is not intuitive, buyers will assume doing business with you is just as difficult.

5. Slow Vendor Response Times (24%)

Rounding out the top five is a classic, and now inexcusable, complaint: slow vendor response times. A quarter of buyers are still held back by waiting for someone to answer an email just to confirm stock levels or get an order update. In today’s market, this kind of delay is a competitive liability.

The technology to provide this information instantly has been table stakes for a while now. Real-time inventory APIs can show exact stock levels across an entire supply chain. Automated order tracking can give buyers the visibility they need, 24/7. Waiting is no longer an acceptable part of the B2B buying process.

The First Steps to a Frictionless Experience

These five friction points are symptoms of a single underlying problem: a reliance on legacy technology and outdated processes disconnected from modern buyer expectations.

At NETCONOMY, our work begins with understanding a customer’s business and its market. To eliminate friction, you must first identify precisely where it lives in your own processes.

1. Start with an Audit

Map your current buying journey from your customer’s perspective. Go beyond assumptions and gather hard data. Time your top five most common user tasks, like placing a repeat order or finding a past invoice. Survey your top ten customers about their biggest frustrations. Use session recording tools to see exactly where users get stuck or abandon their carts. This process will reveal the most urgent priorities for improvement.

2. Prioritize Radical Transparency

The demand for transparency is absolute. Use real-time APIs to connect your inventory systems directly to your customer-facing portal. This gives buyers the confidence to make purchasing decisions on the spot. For pricing, implement a headless commerce architecture. This decouples your front-end user experience from your back-end ERP, allowing for instantaneous API calls for complex, customer-specific pricing without slowing down the site. This is the technical foundation for building digital trust.

3. Streamline Your Workflows

A modern, composable architecture is the key to operational agility. Instead of relying on a single, monolithic platform, this approach uses best-in-class, independent tools for specific jobs – like a dedicated workflow engine for approvals – and connects them via APIs. This allows you to design and automate complex approval chains that match how your customers actually work, rather than forcing them into the rigid logic of an outdated system. This is how you build a platform that is both powerful and flexible.

Become Easier to Do Business With

Winning in the current B2B landscape is no longer just about the quality of your product or the competitiveness of your price. It is about the quality of the buying experience you provide. The companies that thrive will be those that invest in making every interaction intuitive, transparent, and fast. By systematically eliminating friction, you build a powerful and lasting competitive advantage.

The insights shared here are just the beginning. For a deeper dive into the data, including more granular breakdowns and regional comparisons that can inform your strategy, we invite you to explore the full 2025 B2B Buyer Benchmark Report. The findings will provide the clarity you need to build a digital experience that truly resonates with your B2B buyers.

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