B2B Checkout Speed: What 2.2 Million Sessions Reveal About Where Business Buyers Get Stuck

September 9, 2026 at 07:00 AM

What we looked at

At Briqpay we sit inside a large number of checkouts across our merchant network, business and consumer alike. We pulled together 2.2 million completed checkout sessions from the past four years (Aggregated and anonymised, with roughly 1.4% of rows flagged as internal test traffic excluded) and asked a simple question: does a business buyer's checkout actually behave differently from a consumer's?

One honest caveat up front, in the same spirit as our earlier look at Nordic mobile payment data: this dataset mirrors Briqpay's own merchant mix, which skews heavily toward Sweden and the wider Nordics, with the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and a long tail of other markets making up a smaller share. That means the patterns below describe checkout behaviour across our network broadly, not a UK-only sample. We don't think that weakens the findings, since nothing about company verification steps or basket complexity is specific to one country, but we want to be upfront about what the data can and can't claim.

We split every session by customer type, business buyers checking out on behalf of a company, and consumers buying for themselves, then measured how long each group actually spends between starting checkout and completing it, using the funnel timestamps every session already records.

The headline finding: business buyers are faster, until they aren't

The median business checkout completes in 34 seconds. The median consumer checkout takes 59 seconds, well over half again as long. On a typical checkout, in other words, a business buyer is faster than a consumer, not slower, which cuts against the assumption that B2B checkout is inherently more cumbersome.

But medians hide the story that actually matters here. Looking at the 90th percentile, the slowest 10% of sessions, the picture flips: business checkouts at the 90th percentile take 317 seconds, consumer checkouts 283 seconds. Business buyers are faster on average, and they have a longer, slower tail.

Put those two numbers side by side and a pattern emerges. Most business checkouts are quick, quicker than a typical consumer's, because a returning buyer with saved company details can move through a form in seconds. But a meaningful minority of business sessions run into something that eats an extra minute or more, verifying a company, checking a credit line, resolving a lookup that did not return the expected match, friction a consumer checkout structurally does not have, because there is no company to verify.

This lines up with what Baymard Institute has documented across checkout research generally: 17% of shoppers who abandon a purchase cite a checkout that felt too long or too complicated, and the average checkout asks for 23.48 form fields against a recommended 12 to 14. B2B checkout adds a category of field, and a category of failure mode, that consumer checkout does not have to deal with at all.

Why the tail matters more than the median

It is tempting to read "B2B checkout is faster at the median" as the whole story and move on. We would resist that. The buyers stuck in that slower tail are disproportionately likely to be your highest-value transactions, since verification and credit-line checks scale with deal size and company complexity, not with how quickly someone can click through a form. Losing a percentage of your largest deals to a stalled credit check costs more than losing the same percentage of your smallest.

It also matters because the direction of travel in B2B buying is toward self-service. Forrester has projected that more than half of large B2B transactions, deals over $1 million, will move through digital self-service channels rather than a sales rep. Gartner's research puts a number on the buyer preference behind that shift: 61% of B2B buyers say they would rather buy without talking to a rep at all. Every one of those buyers is, by definition, relying on the checkout itself to do what a salesperson used to do, reassure them the transaction is legitimate and get them through the process. A checkout with a long, unpredictable tail is a weak substitute for that reassurance.

A wrinkle worth flagging, not a conclusion

We also looked at manually typed company details versus an automated company lookup, since autofill is generally assumed to speed things up. In our data it does not: sessions where a buyer manually typed their company details had a median time of 18 seconds, against 46 seconds for sessions that used a lookup.

We do not think this means autofill is slowing merchants down, and we would caution against reading it that way. When we controlled for sole traders, who almost always use the lookup path, the gap held, so that specific explanation doesn't account for it. But manual entry sessions carry a meaningfully lower average order value than lookup sessions in our data, which suggests the two paths may simply correlate with deal size and complexity rather than one path causing the other's speed. We are flagging this as an open question worth a merchant's own investigation, not a finding we would build a recommendation on.

What this means if you sell to businesses

None of this argues against verification, a real credit check protects both sides of a B2B transaction, and instalment and invoice based payment methods depend on it being done properly. We covered the trade-offs between invoice, instalments and direct debit in detail in Invoice, Instalments, or Direct Debit? Choosing the Right B2B Payment Mix.

The point is narrower: know that your own checkout almost certainly has this same shape, a fast typical path and a slow, high stakes tail, and treat the tail as a distinct problem to solve rather than an unavoidable cost of doing business with companies. B2B buy now, pay later options like Billie exist specifically to move the credit decision out of that slow manual path, see How to Accept Billie Payments, which is one concrete way merchants are already shortening that tail today.

A note on methodology

This analysis is based on aggregated, anonymised checkout session data from Briqpay's merchant network, covering completed sessions (flagged as internal test traffic, roughly 1.4% of rows, were excluded). Checkout duration was measured using each session's own funnel timestamps, from first interaction to completed payment. Business and consumer sessions were separated using each session's recorded customer type. No individual company, buyer, order, or merchant can be identified from any figure in this piece, every number reported is a median, percentile, or aggregate share across thousands of sessions.

These findings sit alongside the broader case we've made in what actually reduces checkout costs and cart abandonment: friction in the payment step costs merchants real, measurable conversion, and the businesses that treat checkout as product infrastructure rather than an afterthought are the ones that keep more of the deals they've already won.