Friction in the buyer path: why Russian customers pick the familiar

A person stands at a supermarket shelf. On the left is a new yogurt that is objectively better: cleaner ingredients, the same price, a nicer taste. On the right is the one they have been buying for three years. The hand goes right. The right-hand option is easier, which is a different thing from better: no reading, no comparing, no risk.

This is how behavior channels work. Any human action flows along the path of least resistance, and that path almost always leads to the familiar. For a company entering Russia the idea matters more than it does at home, because in a new market you are the unfamiliar option by definition, and your path to purchase was usually designed for someone else.

What a behavior channel is

I use the word channel for the path a person travels from the thought “I want this” to the act “I did it”. One path has wide edges and a smooth surface, and you roll down it on your own. Another is a narrow passage with potholes and an uphill climb. Your product almost always sits on the second path. The competitor your customer is used to sits on the first. That is the main reason good products lose to average ones.

Every path has three properties worth keeping in mind.

Width. How many people can travel it. A wide path means buying in one click, in any store, with no registration and no call to a manager. A narrow one means an order goes through a four-step form followed by a wait for a callback.

Resistance. The friction along the way. Every extra effort, every moment of “how does this work”, every second of doubt adds to it. People feel friction physically rather than rationally: they get bored or anxious, the task starts to feel like a chore. And they leave.

Length. The number of steps between wanting and getting. A habitual purchase takes two: see it, take it. A new product is a long chain: notice, understand, compare, believe, decide, pay. Every link in that chain is a place where the person can change their mind.

A habit is a wide, smooth, short path. Anything new is narrow, rough and long, simply because it is new.

Why the familiar beats the better

The brain is economical. Other things being equal, it picks the option that costs the least effort right now. This is no fault of the customer: it is a built-in mechanism that saves energy across thousands of small decisions a day.

The corner shop beats a cheaper hypermarket because it is three minutes away on foot. A familiar bank keeps a customer despite a poor app, because moving a salary account is a hassle. Checking something new costs more than repeating something old.

Now look at your product through the customer’s eyes. To reach you, they have to find you, then understand what you do, then believe you will not cheat them, and only then break an old habit and form a new one. Four barriers in a row, and at each one they lose some of their desire.

This is why “we are better than the competitor” advertising so often fails. The customer is stuck on the first barrier and does not yet know who you are, while you are already proving superiority. Widen the path first, then talk about quality.

How the Russian path differs from the one you know

In Russia the familiar path often differs from the one a Western team assumes. A foreign company that copies its home funnel carries its home friction into a market where the customer has smoother local alternatives a click away. Four differences come first.

Where people start. Search in Russia runs largely through Yandex, and a large share of everyday purchases start on marketplaces such as Ozon and Wildberries. For many categories the marketplace is the habit. A brand site asking a stranger to register, fill in a delivery form and pay by an unfamiliar method competes with a path the customer has walked many times.

How people pay. Visa and Mastercard cards issued abroad do not work in Russia, and Russian cards do not work with most foreign payment processors. A checkout built for a European payment provider can be a dead end for a Russian buyer. The local habit is a Mir card or a transfer through the Faster Payments System by QR code. If the payment step is unfamiliar, it is the steepest point of the whole path, at the exact moment when the desire to buy is highest.

How people contact you. An email address and an English-language form are a narrow path here. Russian customers are used to writing to a business in a messenger such as Telegram and expect a quick reply in Russian.

What the form must contain. Russian personal data law requires consent to data processing, so a form needs a consent line and a link to a privacy policy. That is a legal requirement, and it should not become an excuse for a longer form. Keep the consent to one line and cut everything else that is not needed.

Western conversion advice assumes a Google-centric journey and payment methods that work everywhere. In Russia the friction sits in different places, most often at payment and at first contact.

How to remove friction on the way to a purchase

One counterintuitive idea I repeat in every review: pushing harder rarely helps; removing what gets in the way does. Persuasion is pressure, and pressure is friction in itself. Sales go more easily where walking is easier.

Some concrete techniques that lower resistance:

• A free trial widens the path. It removes the risk barrier: the person does not have to pay to check. They get used to the product, and moving to a paid plan becomes a step instead of a leap.
• A familiar interface reduces friction. If your product looks and works like something the person already uses, they do not have to relearn. That is why new apps copy familiar gestures. Every new button someone has to master is another reason to leave.
• A friend’s recommendation bypasses the trust barrier. The person borrows trust from someone they already believe. One sentence like “I ordered from them, it was fine” outweighs ten of your advertising promises. Word of mouth and reviews work where advertising stalls.

Then come details that each remove a gram of friction: payment in one tap, the price on the page instead of “ask a manager”, an answer to a common fear right in the description, a clear first step instead of a vague “leave a request”.

A live example. Path one to booking a service: a long form, a consent box, then a wait for a call back. Path two: tap “Message us”, write one line, get an answer within a minute. Same service, same price, and far more people complete path two. The product did not change. The path to it did.

The same holds for a shop that forces account creation before checkout while its rival allows a guest order in three fields. Registration cuts people off exactly when their wish to buy peaks. Every mandatory field is a small tax on your own conversion rate.

Advertising through Yandex Direct shortens only the first barrier, being found. After the click the path does the work: people walk through only if the passage is smooth.

Why brand lowers resistance

There is one barrier that neither price nor a convenient button removes: anxiety about the unknown. People cannot always explain why one product earns trust at first sight and another makes them wary. It comes down to recognition and a sense that the brand is “one of ours”.

A familiar brand is a path the person has already walked in their head, even without buying. They have seen the logo, heard the name, met it at a friend’s place. By the moment of purchase the product is no longer a stranger, so the trust barrier is partly lowered in advance. This is why brand work is about more than a nice picture. Its job is to make sure that when a person meets your price tag, you already feel familiar rather than suspicious.

New companies compete on price and quality because those are easy to compare, and lose on recognition, which no comparison table shows. Calm is part of the price too; it just is not printed on the label.

For a foreign company in Russia this effect is doubled: a name well known at home may be unknown here, and a Latin-script name with no Russian context reads as distant. In large purchases it grows further. The more expensive the decision, the scarier a mistake, and the more a familiar name outweighs a slightly better offer from someone nobody has heard of. A newcomer has to stop being a stranger before being better counts for anything.

Brand is a way of paying in advance for lower friction. Advertising brings a person once. Recognition makes them come back on their own.

Where to start: draw your channel

Take a sheet of paper and draw your customer’s path to your product as a road, from the moment they first hear of you to the money in your account. Mark every step: saw an ad, clicked, landed on the site, looked for the price, hesitated, wrote in the chat, waited for a reply, placed the order.

Then walk the line and ask three questions at each step. Where is the barrier someone could get stuck on? Where is the friction, the extra effort that could be removed? What could be dropped entirely so there are fewer steps?

For a Russian funnel, check the drawing against session recordings in Yandex Metrica: they show where people hesitate and abandon a form, which beats the guesses of a team that has never bought anything in Russia.

There are almost always two or three places where you narrowed the path yourself: a form with eight fields where two would do, a price hidden behind a phone call, a first screen that does not say what you sell.

If you want an outside view of where exactly your customer stalls, this is how a free review starts: we draw the path together and find the places where the flow trips.

Keep the order of work in mind: remove the friction first, then invest in traffic. Otherwise you pay to bring people to an entrance where they turn around.

People rarely choose the best option. They choose whatever is easiest to reach. Your job is less about becoming the best and more about becoming the nearest.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Каналы поведения: почему выбирают привычное