We attempt to link every stat in this post to a primary document with a direct link, rather than link to a blog that links to another blog that has no source, leading to the proliferation of ghost stats. If you notice any stats are amiss, let us know!
62% of industrial buyers purchased online in 2025, up from just 45% in 2018.
This is from BigCommerce's 2025 Industrial Buyer Report, built on a survey of 345 buyers of electrical, HVAC, and industrial supply products, conducted with Channel Marketing Group. The survey was designed to benchmark against a 2018 Channel Marketing Group study of the same buyer population, which is what makes the seven-year comparison possible rather than a rough estimate.
62.3% of buyers now purchase electrical, HVAC, or industrial supply products online, and that online activity represents roughly 30% of total purchase volume — a 702% increase in online purchase share since 2018.
Same report. The gap between "62% of buyers have bought online" and "only 30% of total volume is online" is worth sitting with: digital adoption among individual buyers has moved faster than digital's actual share of spend, which suggests most buyers are still splitting their purchasing between online and traditional channels rather than switching over completely.
65.8% of industrial B2B buyers say buying online is easy, and 60% say it saves them time.
Also from the same BigCommerce report. The report's own framing, cited directly on BigCommerce's site, notes that when these expectations aren't met, buyers "likely turn to digital-first competitors like Amazon" — which lines up directly with Amazon Business's own disclosed expansion into repair tools and other MRO-adjacent categories.
Grainger reported $17.9 billion in 2025 revenue, serving 4.6 million active customers with more than 35 million products offered globally.
This comes directly from Grainger's 2025 Annual Report, filed with the SEC. Grainger operates two reportable segments: High-Touch Solutions N.A. (the traditional sales-rep-supported model, $14.0 billion in 2025 revenue) and Endless Assortment (Zoro.com in the U.S., MonotaRo in Japan — both largely self-service, digital-only channels, $3.6 billion in 2025 revenue).
The digital-first Endless Assortment segment grew sales 15.7% in 2025 — more than 7 times faster than the 2.0% growth in Grainger's traditional High-Touch segment.
This split, within a single company's own reported financials, is one of the clearest available data points on where growth is actually concentrating in industrial distribution: not in the sales-rep-led model, but in the self-service digital catalog. It's a single company's internal mix, not an industry-wide claim — but it's a company large enough, and transparent enough in its reporting, that the pattern is worth taking seriously.
Amazon Business surpassed $60 billion in annualized gross sales in Q2 2026, up from roughly $35 billion at the end of 2022 — a 71% increase in under four years.
Amazon Business announced this milestone on July 21, 2026, reporting more than 11 million organizations now buying through the platform, including 97 of the Fortune 100. The company also disclosed that its product selection expanded nearly 30% in 2026, led by categories including repair tools — a direct overlap with traditional MRO distributor territory. Gross sales (GMV) measures total transaction value through the marketplace, not Amazon's own revenue.
67% of B2B buyers now prefer a purchasing experience with no sales rep involved.
Gartner surveyed 646 B2B buyers between August and September 2025 and published the findings on March 9, 2026. The same survey found 45% of buyers had used AI during a recent purchase, and a separate figure Gartner reported at the same time put the preference for a "completely digital, self-service buying experience" at 70%.
69% of B2B buyers say they turn to a human sales rep specifically to validate information they got from AI.
Gartner published this finding on May 20, 2026, drawing on the same buyer research program (roughly 645 buyers, fielded August–September 2025). The same release found buyers use an average of seven different information sources during a single purchase — meaning the buyer who prefers not to talk to a rep during research still frequently wants a human to confirm the AI-generated answer before committing. For distributors selling parts where a wrong spec has real consequences, that validation moment is where a knowledgeable rep, a clear product page, and accurate technical content all have to be pointing at the same answer.
Traffic from AI sources to U.S. retail websites grew 393% year over year in Q1 2026.
Adobe Digital Insights measured this across more than 1 trillion tracked visits to U.S. retail sites, published April 2026. This is retail-wide data, not MRO-specific — Adobe's dataset spans general ecommerce — but the underlying mechanism (AI systems recommending products based on how well a site's data can be read) applies directly to spec-heavy industrial catalogs.
The average retail product page is only 66% machine-readable, the lowest score of any page type Adobe measured — trailing homepages (75%) and category pages (74%).
This gap matters more for industrial and MRO catalogs than most verticals: product pages are exactly where compliance data, load ratings, certifications, and compatibility specs live — the details an AI system needs to confirm a product is the right match before it can recommend it with confidence.
The presence of a Google AI Overview correlates with a 58% lower click-through rate for the No. 1 organic search result, up from a 34.5% drop measured in April 2025.
Ahrefs reached this figure comparing 300,000 keywords with Search Console data through December 2025. The decline has roughly doubled over the past year rather than leveling off.
Google users click a traditional organic result in just 8% of visits when an AI Overview is present, versus 15% without one — and 26% of AI Overview sessions end without any click at all, versus 16% for standard search sessions.
Pew Research Center's July 2025 report is based on browsing data from 900 U.S. adults across 68,879 Google searches, with AI Overview data collected April 7–17, 2025. Google publicly disputed Pew's methodology as "flawed" and "not representative of Search traffic" — worth noting as a live, contested finding rather than settled fact.
Mobile retail sites see 45% lower conversion rates than desktop, according to research Google commissioned from Deloitte.
This figure is from "Milliseconds Make Millions," a study Google commissioned and Deloitte Ireland prepared, based on data collected in late 2019 across 37 brands (15 in retail) in Europe and the U.S. It's older data (worth flagging) but it's also the most rigorously documented study of its kind still in circulation, and Deloitte's own report notes the underlying data was supplied by a third party and not independently audited by Deloitte.
A 0.1-second improvement in mobile load speed was associated with an 8.4% increase in retail conversion rate and a 9.2% increase in average order value.
Same report, same caveats on age and methodology apply. For distributors managing large, spec-dense catalogs, page weight tends to grow with catalog complexity — more attributes, more filtering, more embedded documentation — which makes this a relevant tension to manage rather than a one-time fix.
The growth gap between digital-first and traditional distribution is showing up inside individual distributors' own numbers, not just in outside analyst commentary. Grainger's Endless Assortment segment outgrowing its High-Touch segment by more than 7x in the same fiscal year, inside the same company's SEC filing, is a harder data point than most industry projections.
Amazon Business's expansion into repair tools and other MRO-adjacent categories is a direct, disclosed competitive signal, not speculation — the company named these categories itself in its own July 2026 announcement.
Buyer research has moved almost entirely off the sales call, but the sales conversation hasn't disappeared — its role has shifted to validation. The 69% figure on buyers checking AI-sourced information with a rep suggests distributors need product data and technical content that a rep can point to and confirm, not just data built to attract the initial click.
Product-page machine-readability is the specific weak point in AI-driven discovery, and it's also usually the page type carrying the most complex, safety- and compliance-relevant information in an industrial catalog — which is exactly the content AI systems most need to read correctly before recommending a part.
SCUBE Marketing specializes in SEO and paid media for high-SKU, spec-driven ecommerce brands, including industrial and MRO distributors. If your catalog spans thousands of SKUs and your product data isn't structured for how buyers actually search for parts, the SCUBE Game Plan is a free diagnostic that shows where visibility is leaking and what a realistic path forward looks like.
