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The Checkout Wall: Where B2C Funnels Go to Die
By Rhyn Potgieter
I’ve been working through the research on how business buyers actually purchase online, and two findings sit very oddly next to each other. Gartner reports that around 83% of B2B buyers now prefer to order and pay through digital channels. Yet in Sana Commerce’s B2B Buyer Report, roughly half of those same buyers say their suppliers’ e-commerce sites don’t fully meet their expectations, and the overwhelming majority report running into problems when they try to place an order.
So, the buyers are ready, the platforms are live and the orders still aren’t flowing. The interesting question is where they die, and it isn’t the product page and it isn’t price. It’s checkout.
The funnel everyone copied
It works beautifully. For consumers.
The trouble starts when a software vendor takes that funnel, adds a “B2B module”, and sells it to a distributor whose average order is forty line items on 60-day terms. The funnel assumes the person browsing is the person paying. In business purchasing, that is almost never true.
What to look for instead
If your company sells to other businesses, the checklist for a commerce platform looks nothing like the feature lists most vendors publish. The questions I’d ask are practical ones.
- Can a buyer turn a cart into a quote, and can your team price that quote before it becomes an order?
- Who approves, and where does that approval live?
- Can a customer’s account hold multiple users with different roles, so the person who requests isn’t the person who signs off?
- Does the platform understand contract pricing, where the same product shows a different price to every customer based on their negotiated terms?
- Can a buyer check out on account , against a credit limit you control, with a PO number captured on the order?
- Does all of it speak to your ERP (Sage, Syspro or SAP), so an order captured online is an order captured once?
None of this is exotic. It’s just purchasing, the way it has worked since long before the web. The failure isn’t that the technology doesn’t exist. It’s that most platforms treat these requirements as an afterthought bolted onto a consumer core, and you can feel the bolt every time you use them.
"If your biggest customers can't buy the way they actually buy, they're not abandoning carts, they're abandoning you."
You don’t have to solve it all at once
The other trap I’d flag is the “big bang” re-platform, eighteen months of implementation and a licence bill that reads like a second payroll. Our team at Webtonic has spent 15+ years building software for businesses, and the approach we’ve settled on is deliberately phased.
A strong base first, usually the catalogue, customer specific pricing and account checkout. Then approvals, quoting and deeper ERP integration as the business is ready for them. Built on open-source foundations, there’s no annual licence fee attached and no vendor holding your roadmap hostage, which matters when your requirements are shaped by your customers rather than by a platform’s release schedule.
Because in the end, the measure is a simple one. If your biggest customers can’t buy the way they actually buy, they’re not abandoning carts, they’re abandoning you. I’m proud to be part of a team helping South African businesses build digital commerce that works the way their customers already purchase.