What Younger B2B Buyers Expect, and Why Most Suppliers Still Miss It

A new generation is entering procurement, and it brings habits from consumer shopping: self service, visible pricing, checking out a supplier without talking to a sales rep, and content it can watch instead of reading a multipage PDF. These habits clash with the classic B2B model built on long cycles, quote on request, and a relationship with an account manager.

However the change did not begin with Gen Z. Millennials started it, as the first to bring app store expectations into the workplace. Gen Z follows and accelerates the shift, but it is rarely the person who owns the budget. More often it is the voice that influences a decision and the end user with veto power. So the point is not that Gen Z has taken over buying. The point is that it sets the new standard of expectations for the entire market.

The cost of the information gap

The problems start with the price list, and more importantly its visibility. Sana Commerce reports that 85 percent of B2B buyers are frustrated with how online buying works today, and 75 percent would move to another supplier for a better experience. The most common reason to switch is no longer price, but inconsistent information across the supplier's own departments. In other words, buyers judge a vendor as one system, and a broken experience is a reason to leave rather than a minor annoyance.

The frustration runs deeper among younger buyers. Forrester finds 90% of Millennial and Gen Z buyers are dissatisfied with suppliers in at least one area, against 71% among older generations. They expect more and say so more loudly.

A market that has already turned over

This is not a small group. Forrester reports that Millennials and Gen Z became the majority of B2B buyers in 2022 at 64%, reaching 71% a year later, and they make up roughly 67% of buyers on deals above 1M dollars.

The decision weight still sits with Millennials, though. Sopro finds the strongest decision making power among buyers aged 35 to 44, at 38% of the total, while LinkedIn for Marketing puts the share of Gen Z who decide on their own at just 10%, against 59% for Millennials. Gen Z is not yet running the room, but it occupies more of the table every year.

The new baseline

Four expectations have quietly become standard rather than special requests.

The journey now happens largely without a rep. Gartner reports that 57% of the buying process ran without sales contact in 2015, rising to 80 percent by 2024, and TrustRadius finds 87% of B2B customers prefer to research on their own before reaching out.

Buyers move across many channels at once. McKinsey's 2026 Global B2B Pulse counts about 10 channels in a single journey, with AI now in the top five used to evaluate a supplier.

Video and social proof carry real weight. Google and Vidyard put the share of B2B buyers who meet video content somewhere in the process at about 70%, and Gen Z leans on reviews, peer conversations, and industry forums more than older buyers do.

Visible pricing has become a condition of trust. TrustRadius finds 49% of software buyers name the absence of public pricing as the first thing they would change, and Forrester reports 29% of buyers under 30 expect AI driven personalization, instant chatbot support, and a mobile first experience.

The committee trap

A B2B decision is almost never made alone, which is where simple narratives about Gen Z fall apart. Forrester puts the average purchase at 13 people inside the organization and 9 outside of it, and younger leaders make that group bigger: Sopro finds buyers under 40 involve about 6.8 people on average, against 3.5 for older managers.

Inside that committee, every generation wants something different. Gen X wants data, case studies, and benchmarks. Millennials want personalization and a nod from their community. Gen Z wants authenticity and alignment with company values, and tends to distrust content it recognizes as AI generated. No single format reaches all of them at once.

From a B2B implementation standpoint, the most important change is not that Gen Z "took over buying," but that it raised the bar for the whole buying committee. The younger buyer often does not decide the contract, yet is the first to run the research, and if there is no price, no demo, and no way to place a trial order independently, the project never reaches the conversation with the head of procurement. At the same time, the committee also includes Gen X members who need benchmarks and case studies. An effective B2B channel therefore has to serve both perspectives in one consistent experience. Modern eCommerce platforms come with ready made solutions built for these needs. The question is whether a given deployment uses them, or still forces contact with a sales rep where the buyer does not always need it.

Szymon Niedziela, CEO at Fabrity Commerce

The Magento question

Commerce has stopped being a side channel. McKinsey reports that 71% of B2B firms now sell online, and willingness to place an order above 50 thousand dollars on the web rose from 59% in 2022 to 73% in the 2026 study.

It helps to separate the application from the deployment model. Adobe Commerce, the commercial edition of Magento that Adobe acquired in 2018, has a native B2B module and the self service features younger buyers expect: quick ordering, reordering, self managed accounts, and fully online quote negotiation. The platform itself is not the blocker.

The deployment model is a separate matter. The SaaS variant for Adobe Commerce, introduced in 2025, alongside the earlier On-Premise and PaaS models, does not focus on buyer expectations but on the cost of running the platform, since it hands updates and infrastructure scaling to Adobe in exchange for less customization. It therefore suits teams that want to offload infrastructure and can work within those limits, rather than heavily customized deployments, which tend to stay on PaaS or opt for Magento Open Source.

The real issue is configuration, not the platform name or the hosting model: many deployments still keep prices behind a login and route buyers through a long request for quote form, even though the same platform can open the catalogue, show the price, and shorten the path. In practice, that line separates a setup built for the 2026 buyer from one still built for the buyer of 2015.

What the research points to

• Visible pricing lowers the barrier to entry. A public price list, or at least a range, answers buyers' most frequent complaint, while a quote only model loses part of the audience before anyone makes contact.

• Video and self service demos now outperform a product sheet and a long document, especially given the appetite for short, concrete messaging.

• Self service and a fast path, meaning quick ordering, reordering, account management, and AI assisted search, meet the expectation of independence from the sales rep.

• Content that works covers the whole committee at once: data and benchmarks for Gen X, social proof for Millennials, and a clear value message with authenticity for Gen Z, since no single person speaks for the other dozen.

• The human contribution still matters, particularly for brand trust. A hybrid model, where the buyer chooses the moment of contact, remains the strongest option.

• Consistency across channels has gone from an advantage to a requirement, since fragmented information is now the leading reason buyers walk away.