Invoice Becomes Shopping Cart in B2B Payments

According to PYMNTS, business invoicing remains high-volume but under-digitized, with fewer than a quarter of invoices electronic and many others existing as paper or PDF. PYMNTS reports that Amazon Business is positioned to capture more than $80 billion in volume and cites a 2025 survey showing 57% of U.S. B2B buyers purchase through Amazon Business and 39% through Walmart Business. PYMNTS also reports that Costco is growing its digital channel at double-digit quarter-over-quarter rates. Many small and midsize buyers check out with a virtual or commercial card on file, moving both tail spend and an increasing share of planned, strategic purchases into cart-and-card flows.

Companies shifting spend into cart-based commerce typically consolidate catalog, pricing, and payment metadata at checkout, shortening settlement cycles and increasing structured traceability of line items. That pattern reduces manual invoice processing, lowers reconciliation friction, and creates richer labeled datasets that support ML use cases such as automated PO-match, supplier risk scoring, and spend forecasting.

Three signals indicate whether the shift is broadening beyond tail spend: marketplace share by B2B platforms (PYMNTS cites Amazon Business volume); percentage of buyers adopting cards-on-file and virtual cards; and digital channel growth rates for large suppliers (PYMNTS reports double-digit gains for Costco). Increased cart-first volume will influence data ingestion design, feature engineering for transaction models, and latency SLAs for real-time decisioning in procure-to-pay systems.