Friction in the online buying journey is doing far more damage to customer trust than most brands realize, according to a new Customer Experience research report released today by Epignosis Insights Research. The study, based on a survey of 1,840 online and omnichannel shoppers across retail, electronics, fashion, and quick-commerce categories, finds that checkout-stage friction is not just a conversion problem — it is a measurable, compounding driver of eroding customer trust that, left unaddressed, does not recover on its own.
The research identifies cart and checkout as the single most damaging stage in the customer journey, with 52% of consumers reporting friction at this point, followed closely by payment (47%) and post-purchase support (39%). By contrast, the early discovery and awareness stage saw friction reported by just 18% of consumers, underscoring that friction becomes more consequential and more memorable the closer a shopper gets to committing money and personal information.
When asked to name their single biggest frustration, consumers pointed overwhelmingly to a small set of addressable issues. Complex or unnecessarily long checkout flows topped the list at 24% of complaints, followed by hidden fees revealed only at the final payment step (21%) and forced account creation before checkout (16%). Slow page load times, limited payment options, unclear return policies, and unresponsive customer support rounded out the top seven friction points identified in the study.
Behavioral data collected alongside the survey shows the direct funnel cost of this friction: of consumers who add an item to their cart, only 68% reach checkout, 51% enter payment details, and just 41% complete the purchase. Consumers who reported encountering a specific friction point at a given stage were more than twice as likely to abandon at that same stage compared to those who reported no friction reframing friction reduction as a direct revenue lever rather than a purely experiential concern. Researchers noted that even modest fixes, such as offering guest checkout by default or surfacing full pricing earlier in the flow, produced measurable improvements in completion rates independent of any change in product, price, or marketing spend.
The report’s most significant finding concerns what happens to customer trust after a friction event. Baseline trust scores averaged 7.9 out of 10 before any incident. Trust dropped to 6.8 immediately after a friction event that was resolved quickly, but fell further, to 5.1, when friction went unresolved.
Critically, the two groups diverged sharply from there: consumers who received fast, transparent resolution saw trust climb back to 7.8 within a month effectively full recovery while consumers whose friction was ignored saw trust continue falling, to 4.2, over the same period.
Friction incidence also varies sharply by channel. Mobile web registered the highest rate at 44%, ahead of third-party marketplace purchases (38%), desktop web (31%), native mobile apps (29%), and in-store digital kiosks (19%). Researchers noted that the gap between mobile web and native app friction, despite both being accessed on the same device class, points to weaker design investment in mobile web experiences relative to dedicated apps — and flagged marketplace friction as a particular blind spot, since consumers tend to attribute friction on third-party platforms directly to the brand being sold rather than the marketplace operator.
"The data makes clear that friction itself isn’t what determines long-term trust damage how a brand responds to it is," said the lead analyst on the study. "A friction event handled quickly and transparently can leave trust essentially intact. But when friction goes unaddressed, we don’t see trust plateau at a lower level — we see it keep falling. That should change how organizations think about resourcing complaint handling and service recovery: speed isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the single biggest lever brands have to protect the customer relationship."
Epignosis Insights’ analysts recommend that brands prioritize checkout simplification as the highest-leverage friction fix, surface full pricing including shipping, taxes, and fees as early as possible in the journey, and build a fast-response protocol for complaint and friction resolution given its outsized impact on trust recovery. The report also urges brands to close the experience gap between mobile web and native app channels, and to extend friction monitoring to third-party marketplace listings where reputational exposure is often underestimated.
The Customer Journey & Touchpoints report was conducted by Epignosis Insights Research and surveyed 1,840 consumers who had made at least one online or omnichannel purchase within the preceding 90 days. The study combined self-reported friction and trust data with anonymized clickstream and checkout funnel analytics from participating retail partners to validate observed abandonment patterns against consumer-reported experience.
Epignosis Insights is a market research and brand intelligence practice under Mark & Spark Solutions, providing syndicated and custom customer experience research, brand health tracking, and consumer perception studies across retail, BFSI, automotive, and FMCG sectors in India and select global markets.