Your B2B Platform's Real Competitors

Product teams in B2B love competitive analysis. We study the other platforms in our vertical, screenshot their features, build the comparison matrix, and set a goal of being best in class in our space.

Your users are not running that comparison.

A dealer logging into an ordering portal does not think “this is better than the other manufacturer’s portal.” They think “why is this harder than ordering something on Amazon?” They are not comparing you to your industry. They are comparing you to every good checkout, every instant search result, and every app that remembers what they did last time. That is the first real competitor: the rest of the internet.

The second competitor is simpler. It is a phone call.

What the sessions showed

I pulled a month of recorded sessions on a B2B ordering platform, more than 77,000 sessions, and looked at where each one ended. I was not asking who prefers the phone. I was asking what people were trying to do when they gave up.

Two in five sessions end on an order lookup page. Dealers log in, find an order, check its status, and leave. That is the platform’s biggest job. The ones that end on an order’s detail page are the shortest of the three pages I have medians for, and they double back about as often as sessions do overall.

The cart is a different story. One in ten sessions ends on the cart. Among sessions with rage clicks, one in four does. Cart exits carry three to six times the rage-click rate of the order detail and product pages, and the median cart session runs close to twice the median order detail session. On this platform the cart is the whole ordering page: build, confirm, submit, all on one screen.

That last fact cuts both ways, and it is worth saying so out loud. Because submit happens on the same screen, a placed order ends on the cart too, and nothing in a session recording separates the two. So I cannot tell you how many of those exits are orders that got away. What I can tell you is that the screen where ordering happens is the screen dealers are angriest on, by a wide margin, and that they spend the longest there before they go.

Claims is the second hotspot. One in twenty sessions ends there, but nearly one in five rage-click sessions does, and it has the highest rage-click rate of the six pages I looked at. That is the one place where a dealer already has a problem, and the platform adds another one.

These users were not avoiding self-service. They attempted it and hit friction. Where they went after they closed the tab is not in this data, and I want to be plain about that before I say the next part. My reading is that they picked up the phone, because on this platform the phone is the alternative that always works. If that reading holds, every call it produces carries handle time, queue time, and a dealer who has now learned that calling works and clicking does not.

The question changes

That changes the adoption conversation. “How do we get more users onto the platform” leads to training programs, webinars, and adoption campaigns. “What is stopping the ones who are already trying” leads to fixing the search, simplifying the order page, and removing the friction that makes calling the easier option.

Those are different questions with different budgets behind them. Most B2B teams are spending money on the first one while the evidence for the second one is already sitting in their session recordings.

If your competitive analysis deck is about the other platforms in your industry, it is aimed at the wrong competitor. Your users stopped making that comparison a long time ago. When you fall short of the bar the internet set, they do not switch vendors. They pick up the phone.

How I counted

A month of dealer sessions on one ordering platform, ending the day I pulled the export. Six exit pages: order detail, order list, cart, claims, finance, and the product catalog, with medians for three of them.

The cart share among rage-click sessions holds on a ten-month set too. The claims share does not hold as tightly: across ten months it sits closer to one in six than one in five, and the one-in-five figure is the month I am writing about. The rage-click rates by page are the month only.

Two things a reader should hold against everything above. Sessions with rage clicks are a small fraction of the whole, so every figure drawn from that set rests on a much smaller count than the exit shares do. And the recording tool’s exports carry no email address, so internal staff are excluded by a rule about which pages a session touched and how long it ran, rather than by knowing who anyone is. That rule removes a noticeably larger share of the rage-click set than of the whole, which means the proxy is weakest exactly where these figures lean hardest.

I cannot tell you what your platform is losing to the phone. Your session recordings can, and most teams have never gone looking.