I’ve watched buyers take every route there is.
Some researched on the website, then called to order. Some found us on Google and walked in. Some ordered online once, then came back through their rep. Some did all of it in the same week.
The B2B journey rarely ends at checkout. A lot of the time it ends with a phone call, a PO, or a forwarded email. That doesn’t mean the website failed. It means the website is one stop along the way, and every stop is a place you can lose them.
Here are the five stops, and where buyers slip out at each one.
1. Research
Before a buyer picks a supplier, they figure out what they need.
They pull spec sheets and catalog PDFs. They cross-reference a competitor’s part number against yours. They compare you against two or three other suppliers. And some still call before they trust what the page says.
I’ve seen buyers do all four, sometimes for the same order.
Where you lose them: the page doesn’t have the answer, so they go find one that does. Specs stuck in a scanned PDF, no cross-reference, nothing to compare against. The full list of what buyers look for is in 10 Things Buyers Need Before They Ever Pick Up the Phone.
2. Finding You
One customer found us from the road.
He had just picked up a new vac truck in Florida and was driving it back to Alaska. He was going to be traveling through our area, and he chose us because we were the easiest to find on his way back. He could order online.
He placed the order, and we confirmed it would be ready. Until he got there, the warehouse manager kept asking me when the guy was coming: the order was taking up space, and he was trying to close out tickets. Then he showed up and picked it up.
We weren’t the only supplier along his route. We were the one that showed up when he searched, with a way to buy.
Where you lose them: your products are named the way your company organizes them, not the way buyers search. Or Google and AI search show a competitor first.
3. Checking You Out
Found isn’t the same as chosen.
Before a buyer orders, they check whether you’re legit and whether you’re the right fit. Product pages, the about page, reviews, a phone number, an address, real photos.
Where you lose them: something on the site doesn’t hold up. I watched a sale go to a competitor because an about page claimed something the business couldn’t stand behind. The full story is in They Called the Lead Back And It Went About How You’d Expect.
4. Ordering
This is where B2B splits from retail.
Some buyers check out online. Plenty don’t. The person in the field builds the cart and sends it to purchasing. Someone calls it in. Someone requests a quote. Someone needs a place for a PO number.
Where you lose them: the website only works for one of those paths. The cart doesn’t match what sales quotes, the quote request sits, or checkout has nowhere to put a PO.
5. Coming Back
The first order is the hardest one to get. The second should be the easiest.
Repeat buyers reorder every way you can think of. Order history on the site. A call with an old invoice. Their rep. Rebuilding the cart from scratch.
My favorite was the forwarded email. A buyer would send an old order and say: I need to reorder this, but in different amounts.
Where you lose them: reordering takes as much work as the first order did. No order history, no saved cart, no easy way to change quantities.
How To See Your Own Journey
You won’t find all five stops in one report.
On a site I worked on more recently, the heatmap showed a lot of angry clicks. Most tools call them rage clicks: someone clicks the same spot over and over because they expect something to happen and it doesn’t. Most of them were on the page numbers at the bottom of the blog posts. Some were on buttons with broken links, and those got fixed.
Analytics showed the visits. It didn’t show the frustration.
Three places to look:
- Heatmaps and session recordings. Where buyers click, scroll past, and give up. Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity, and Crazy Egg all do this.
- Customer feedback and reviews. What buyers say when it works and when it doesn’t.
- Your sales team. They hear from buyers at every stop, especially the ones that end in a phone call.
When sales, customer service, and the website give the same answers, it doesn’t matter which stop a buyer is at.
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