A buyer at a gift shop has chosen $8,000 of stock from your wholesale page. Her company pays suppliers on 30-day terms, and her finance team approves every invoice. The figures below are an illustration, not a BeamCart result. Her next five minutes depend on which of two checkouts she lands on.
Checkout A: card only
The page asks for a card number. Her card limit is $5,000, and the card is not hers to use for a purchase this size. She looks for a line about invoices or terms and finds none. She writes to the generic address and waits.
Two days later the answer says "yes, we can invoice," with a form attached. By then she has also priced the same range at another supplier, whose checkout has a "pay on terms" option. The order is not lost to price. It is lost to a payment step.
Checkout B: terms and a person
The second checkout offers card and invoice side by side. She picks terms, enters her purchase order number and sees her credit line applied. She still has a question: can the invoice show her cost center? A button on the page opens a short live conversation, and someone who can see the order says yes and changes it. She places the order in the same visit.
Nothing here is a discount. The second store simply let her pay the way her company pays.
What the survey adds
The Censuswide survey, commissioned by the payments company TreviPay, asked 550 finance, procurement and operations professionals in four European countries about payment. More than half had met a payment option failure with a supplier in the past year. More than nine in ten said that a choice of payment methods makes them more likely to buy again.
On terms, two-thirds called access to trade credit important when choosing a supplier, and nearly three quarters look for it alongside card options, not instead of them. Invoices cause friction too: 34% named slow approval workflows and 34% named trouble matching invoices to purchase orders.
The seller who wrote about the survey sells payment software, so weigh it accordingly. It still describes the same stall that Checkout A builds in.
Check your own checkout this week
Place a test order as a buyer who pays on terms. Count the places where she would have to leave the page. Look for four things: a terms or invoice option at the payment step, a field for a purchase order number, a clear statement of who gets approved for credit, and a visible way to ask a person about any of them.
Our post on what buyers check before a large online order lists the questions that come before payment. This one covers the last step. A buyer who can pay the way her company pays, and ask one question without leaving the page, finishes the order in one visit.
Source
Global Banking & Finance: Price isn't everything, payment options a deciding factor for B2B buyers in Europe, 24 April 2026, by TreviPay's EMEA vice president. It reports a Censuswide survey commissioned by TreviPay, a B2B payments company, of 550 finance, procurement and operations professionals in the UK, France, Germany and Spain. Fieldwork dates were not stated, and the sample is European, so read the figures as a signal rather than a North American benchmark.
