Can Friction Improve Your Customers’ Experiences?

Companies are on a mission to design purchase journeys that are as free of frustration and inconvenience as possible. “Friction kills the customer experience!” has become the conventional wisdom. This is thought to be particularly true when serving online shoppers, who are known to be less patient and have shorter attention spans; after all, competitor websites are but a few clicks away.

Most business leaders we know prioritize eliminating friction at the “moment of truth,” when displaying prices and taking payment, because beyond wanting to make life easier for eager customers, they fear giving customers reason to pause and reconsider their decisions. But as we will demonstrate, it is precisely in giving customers time to consider their purchase decisions when money is on the line that longer-term benefits and cost savings can accrue to the firm.

Friction and the Fickle Online Shopper

It’s easy to see why making shopping as seamless as possible is so urgent for e-commerce companies, when the average global cart abandonment rate for the last 12 months stood at a staggering 71.7% overall — 60.7% among people using desktop or laptop computers, 65.1% among those using tablets, and 77.4% for those using mobile phones.1 This last figure is perhaps the most troubling, given that mobile shopping in the U.S. grew by more than $200 billion in three years to reach $431 billion in 2022.2 According to the Baymard Institute, the average large e-commerce site could increase conversion by 35% by streamlining and simplifying the checkout process.3

Not surprisingly, e-commerce titans such as Amazon and Alibaba are investing heavily in quickly ushering consumers through their moments of truth by making prices and payments nearly invisible. Amazon pioneered one-click shopping back in 1999. Today, the attention is on its Just Walk Out technology, which blends computer vision, weight sensors, and deep learning to bring some of the ease of online shopping to physical stores: Patrons tap a credit card when entering a retail location to open a virtual cart, select items from the shelves, and leave without stopping at the cashier. At Alibaba, digital payments and self-service checkout stations are the norm across its 300 Freshippo supermarkets. People can even leverage its Alipay affiliate’s facial recognition technology to “pay by face.”

Companies with fewer resources are making changes to their purchase processes that are more incremental but no less significant. Consider, for example, the recent popularity of “buy now, pay later” installment financing or of automatic-renewal clauses for subscription-based services, which allow companies to avoid the annual reckoning of customers reconsidering whether they still want the service. Online businesses have embraced these and other opportunities to make spending money less painful simply by allowing customers not to think about it.

However, it is simplistic to think of friction as having strictly negative effects, such as annoying customers or depressing sales. While it is true that too much resistance in the purchase journey can easily crowd out the desire to buy, too little resistance dumbs down decision-making and leads to missed opportunities to better connect with customers. The question we suggest that business leaders ask themselves, then, is whether they really want their customers to purchase on autopilot.

In this article, we explain how a little friction in the buying process can help companies engage customers and offer guidance on how to leverage these effects to build stronger customer relationships.

No Pain, No Gain

Some friction in the purchase journey can protect consumers from fraud, privacy violations, or their own unintended actions. For example, requiring two-step verification and asking the customer to confirm that they want to complete the purchase are two commonsense inconveniences that ultimately ensure that customers are safeguarded from threats and mistakes.

But either too much or too little friction around a purchase decision can have negative effects. Having too many steps in the purchase journey can distract shoppers, leaving them without the cognitive bandwidth to carefully consider their decisions. This fuels cart abandonment rates and removes opportunities to engage customers with the company through reviews, referrals, recommendations, or other interactions. Too little friction, and people don’t think enough about their decisions, giving in to the human inclination to economize on mental effort. This absence of friction is numbing, and the less connected shoppers are with a purchase, the more ambivalent they become. That lack of commitment can in turn prompt product returns, weaken brands, and reduce satisfaction in the long run.

A purchase journey that is sufficiently challenging, however, is engaging. Because the transaction is neither stressful nor straightforward, people have an incentive to invest mental effort in the task. In other words, the right amount of friction can prompt customers to refine and consolidate their preferences and can lead to three benefits for companies.

1. Friction helps sellers select the right customers. Companies that prioritize the long-term profitability of their customer bases over the immediate gain from making a sale must take a holistic and equally long-term perspective on developing relationships with their target audiences. This involves investing in acquisition, retention, and growth. With that idea in mind, the question is whether hurdles that increase the psychological pain of considering an expense will disproportionately deter would-be customers who are more costly to acquire, less likely to purchase again on future occasions, or less likely to increase their spending on the brand over time or recommend the brand.4

Friction to weed out the wrong customers or select the right ones is a familiar technique in luxury goods markets and in any context where a company wants prospective customers to demonstrate commitment. Ferrari, for example, is known for making it difficult to buy special-edition cars.5 Similarly, luxury fashion brands don’t mind fostering queues, whether virtual or real, or complicating the purchase process by temporarily withholding prices, lengthening the checkout process, or using other approaches. The simple logic behind these tactics is that only the customers who are most interested in the company’s products or most invested in the brand will find working through these inconveniences and complications acceptable in the shopping journey.

2. When friction enables better decisions, customer satisfaction improves. Using friction to give consumers a moment to pause and consider the implications of their purchases can forestall buyer’s remorse and encourage shoppers to choose the most appropriate option among the available alternatives.

Making the trade-off between what the potential buyer will pay and what they will receive sufficiently obvious can help prevent mindless purchasing decisions made in the heat of the moment. For example, social media may pitch “buy now, pay later” financing as a savvy way to buy on a budget, but the ease and convenience of such services, now available in many e-commerce sites’ checkout processes, can encourage households to overspend, leading to financial strain and debt accumulation. One survey found that 42% of Americans who took out such a loan made at least one late payment on it.6 In addition, research shows that payments made either long before or long after the natural moment of consumption can reduce people’s attention to cost. Proponents of buy now, pay later assert that this “separates the fun experience of buying from the tedious process of paying,” when in fact such “transaction decoupling” has been shown to reduce the likelihood that the consumer will use the item purchased.7

The advantage of avoiding bad decisions is relatively clear from a public policy perspective: Most people would agree that overspending and chronic underutilization of purchased goods are not desirable qualities in a society. But encouraging more thoughtful engagement by customers via friction in the purchase process can pay off for businesses, too.

One immediate benefit is a drop in return rates. In many sectors, online returns are a considerable drag on financial performance — adding up to as much as 15 to 30 cents per dollar of the price of returned merchandise.8 According to a study by Appriss Retail and the National Retail Federation, close to $220 billion worth of merchandise was returned to U.S. digital retailers in 2021, or approximately 21% of total online sales.9 And this drag, of course, is not just financial — it’s also environmental. Returned products might not be resalable due to wear and tear or other issues and thus end up being sent to landfills or destroyed. According to one report, online returns in the U.S. alone create 5 billion pounds of landfill waste and 15 million tons of carbon emissions annually.10 Adding friction also provides customers with time to consider the purchase and become more invested in it. Brands such as Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Balenciaga delay the communication of prices in a variety of ways — for example, by introducing personalized experiences with salespeople — not only to select better customers, as discussed above, but to put the product center stage and help customers internalize its quality and meaning. Research at the intersection of marketing and neuroscience reports that revealing prices after product information focuses evaluations on attractiveness and desirability (people ask themselves, “Do I like this?”), while doing the opposite focuses evaluations on monetary worth (people ask themselves, “Is it worth it?”).11 In a Gartner study, B2B and B2C customers agreed that if they “realized something new about their needs or their own goals,” they were 1.73 times more likely to buy more.12

Using friction to stimulate thinking that results in a decision to purchase can foster a sense of ownership of the product. This can trigger a stronger bond between company and customers and increase customers’ willingness to invest additional resources in the relationship.13 As customers put more thought into the purchase decision, they tend to feel more emotionally attached to the product they ultimately choose. And there’s evidence that connecting with customers at the emotional level is a valid route to maximizing customer value.14

Finally, research also shows that people tend to value products more when they are obtained through effort — the aptly named “Ikea effect,” in reference to the retailer’s policy of outsourcing the assembly of its furniture to customers.15 The experience of effort can influence how people perceive the value and quality of a product or service, and adding effort to the online purchase process can trigger this effect.

Overall, we see that friction is successful at triggering engagement, and we know that engaged customers are generally more satisfied with their interactions and experiences with brands and retailers. Engaged customers become advocates, increasing visibility and credibility for companies. They are likely to engage in positive word of mouth, which can lead to new-customer acquisition and elevated brand reputation. They are also likely to have better customer service experiences, feel valued by the company, and provide meaningful feedback and suggestions. Such feedback is valuable for understanding evolving customer needs and making the right improvements to products or services over time.

3. Friction creates space for companies to communicate with customers. Retaining some friction exactly when people face prices and payment, especially when this friction is unexpected, gains attention. This is an opportunity for companies to advertise what they stand for and the merits of their offerings.

There are several ways to use friction for promotion. First, companies can involve customers in the payment process to evoke positive emotions. For example, one common practice is to give customers the option to round up the transaction amount to the next highest dollar, with the difference being donated to charity. Another possibility is to introduce pay-what-you-want campaigns, where customers choose the price they will pay for the product. While these initiatives do not expedite payment (it is surprisingly effortful to consider how much one wants to pay for something), they can lead to greater emotional connections.

Companies can also express prices in ways that are intentionally unconventional to force customers to think harder about the underlying message.16 For instance, an advertisement from Ikea uses cans of soda to playfully quantify the prices of its products. Of course, the retailer won’t accept soda as payment for furniture. And although it takes a moment of cognitive effort to understand the “exchange rate,” the message that the furniture is as affordable as a number of small-ticket purchases, such as soda, is conveyed to customers.

Another example is Stella Artois’s award-winning “reassuringly expensive” campaign. The brand attempted to signal the high quality of its beer by introducing the dependency between price and quality into its price communication. Stella upended consumer expectations by playfully offering a coupon that increased the price of the product (“Bring this coupon and pay an extra $1.25 on your next Stella Artois”). By presenting a seemingly confusing and illogical “deal,” it nudged customers to conclude that the product is far superior to that of its competitors (and worth the cost).

Friction in the payment process can also be used to communicate the brand’s values. For example, in 2014, the relief organization Misereor increased donation rates by deploying interactive screens in locations such as airports that asked passersby to donate 2 euros by swiping their credit cards over the screen. The swipe activated an engaging interactive sequence, such as depicting the credit card slicing a piece of bread to feed the hungry or freeing an imprisoned child.

Finally, in a bold example of extreme friction, outdoor retailer REI closed its physical stores and stopped processing online payments on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year in the U.S. Its goal was to take a stand against consumerism and encourage would-be shoppers to spend time outdoors instead — a message that underscores the company’s dedication to accessible exploration.17

The Friction Sweet Spot

Better customer selection, consumer decisions, and promotion are three good reasons to abandon the simplistic goal of zero friction. Given the drawbacks of encouraging customers to purchase on autopilot, business leaders should seek to determine the right degree of friction for their companies’ purchase processes. In our experience, there are at least five factors to consider. We’ll review them and introduce a scorecard that brings them together and helps to guide decision-making. (See “What’s the Right Amount of Friction for Your Online Customer Experience?”)

The first step for every company is to adopt a more accurate definition of what friction is. At the moment, all friction is viewed negatively, which reduces organizations’ sense of needing to specify what it actually is. By most accounts, friction is operationalized in terms of time saved. But not all time is created equal. In fact, companies should view negative friction as anything that blocks or distracts customers from the purchase decision, and positive friction as anything that optimizes deliberation.

The second step is to understand what contexts benefit from positive friction — because this need is not universal. What’s at stake in a particular purchase decision, and does it typically require high or low customer involvement? The two often go together, such that high-stakes decisions also require high involvement, but this is not necessarily the case. For instance, a consumer who is financially secure might not engage more with a purchase decision simply because the item is expensive. And it is exactly when this relation breaks down that you want to step in to proactively manage friction. High-stakes decisions might be such because of the significance of the product or service in question, the scale of the financial outlay, or the personal or social consequences of the purchase. In this spirit, using a technology like Amazon’s Just Walk Out in stadiums might not be good for people who are no longer dissuaded from buying unhealthy snacks by excessively long lines at the concession stand.

Third, think about your commercial objective. If you care about highlighting cost savings relative to competitors’ prices, then, yes — reducing friction by posting your almost-too-good-to-be-true price upfront is worthwhile. However, if you compete on the basis of innovation, quality, or customer service, then perhaps retaining a little friction by delaying when the price is presented is best, because this gets customers to think about and crystallize their preferences. Some friction allows businesses to shift the conversation from “Is it worth it?” to “Do I like it?” And if the goal is to strengthen one’s brand, then adding friction is the right way to go.

Fourth, consider the makeup of your customer base and the relative closeness of customer relationships. Different customer demographics might require more or less friction, depending on expectations around their understanding of a product or service or their ability to pay. Likewise, relationship stage is important. You might want to include more friction in transactions with new customers versus returning customers, in particular those who might be less familiar with your products or product category. You might want to make it harder for a prospective customer to make a purchase, add a bit of friction for a returning customer, and present a frictionless experience to a loyal customer who fully understands the product or service. A company should maximize enduring relationships with clients — because that is the only path to increase customer value.

Fifth, think about your choice of route to market. All retail environments could potentially benefit from some friction, but their application will be different. In a brick-and-mortar store, adding pain points that incentivize interaction between a salesperson and the customer might be the right type of friction. In an online store, however, adding steps to foster deliberation can reduce returns and increase subsequent satisfaction with the company. On social media, a company could look to balance content that engages customer interaction and not just click-through rates, thereby helping to dissuade users from mindlessly or impulsively shopping.

In fact, for a business selling the same product in brick-and-mortar stores and online, more (positive) friction might be needed in the online or mobile channel, given that product returns tend to be greatest in those channels. One interesting technique that some fashion brands have recently introduced is imposing a fee for online returns. Companies like Anthropologie, H&M, and Zara are charging for returning items online (but not for making in-store returns).18 Yes, charging for returns can antagonize some customers. But, again, this point can be key to retaining the most relevant customers and strengthening relationships with those who persist and make a purchase.

---

“How can we make our prices a little less conspicuous and easier to pay?” is among the most common questions asked of user experience teams and experts. But business leaders should embrace the customer moment of truth rather than work to eliminate it. They should not buy into the popular idea that friction is the ultimate conversion killer.

Without a doubt, when used poorly, friction can derail the customer experience. But a frictionless world is just as dangerous. This is a lesson most of us learned years ago from our high school physics teacher: Too much friction prevents progress toward a goal, but too little friction can throw everything into chaos.

Indeed, many business leaders are already telling us that they want customers to spend more productive time on their purchase decisions. This sounds like the perfect job for friction. If thinking leads shoppers to make safer, better choices, and in turn these choices impact companies through lower product returns, more sustainable consumer behavior, higher customer satisfaction, and higher loyalty, then let’s all accept and embrace some hassles and hurdles as yet another — albeit surprising — tool at the disposal of customer centricity.