A customer finds exactly the gift she wants on a small online shop. She adds it to her basket and taps “Checkout”. The form asks for her name, then her name again in a separate “billing” section. Then her email, twice. Then her phone number, in a very specific format. Then a password, which must contain a capital letter, a number and a symbol. Then her date of birth, for reasons nobody explains. Then a “How did you hear about us?” dropdown.
On field fourteen, her bus arrives. She puts her phone away, meaning to come back later. She never does. The shop owner will never know she was there.
Forms are the least glamorous part of any business. Nobody wins a design award for a contact form or a booking page. But forms sit at the exact moment when interest is supposed to turn into action: a purchase, a booking, an enquiry, a sign-up. Every unnecessary question at that moment is a small hurdle, and enough small hurdles make people stop.
The good news is that forms are also among the easiest and cheapest things in a business to fix.
One Like insight: Every question on a form costs your customer something. Make sure it’s worth it.
Where customers give up
The Baymard Institute, an independent research organisation that studies online shopping usability, has spent years tracking why people abandon their purchases. Its running average, drawn from 50 different studies, puts the typical online shopping basket abandonment rate at 70.22%. Roughly seven out of ten people who put something in an online basket leave without buying.
Many of those people were never going to buy. Baymard’s own survey of US shoppers found that 42% had abandoned a basket simply because they were just browsing. But among the remaining reasons, several are entirely within a business’s control. Setting aside the browsers, 18% said they left because the site wanted them to create an account, and 17% because the checkout process was too long or complicated. Others cited website errors, an inability to see the total cost up front, or too few payment options.
These figures come from online shopping, but the same pattern applies to almost any form a small business uses: a booking request, a quote form, a contact page, a new client questionnaire. At the moment someone is ready to act, every extra field, unclear instruction or unexpected hurdle gives them a reason to stop.
Highlight: Many customers who abandon a form weren’t uninterested. They were interrupted, confused or worn down.
Fewer fields, fewer losses
Baymard’s research also gives a sense of scale. Its large-scale usability testing suggests that an ideal checkout can be as short as 12 to 14 form elements, or 7 to 8 actual fields to fill in. Yet its benchmark of real US checkouts found that the average one shows 23.48 form elements by default, with 14.88 fields. In other words, typical checkouts ask for roughly twice as much as they need to. Baymard estimates that most checkouts could cut the number of form elements shown to users by 20 to 60%.
The principle behind those numbers is simple. Every field asks the customer to stop, think, type and check. On a phone, with a small keyboard and a thumb, each one is slower still. A few extra fields might not seem like much to the person designing the form, but to someone filling it in on the bus, they add up quickly.
The most common sources of unnecessary fields are surprisingly familiar: asking for the same information twice, separate fields for things that could be combined, optional questions that look mandatory, and data the business would like to have but doesn’t actually need to complete the task.
[Infographic placement] The form diet. A before-and-after comparison of a booking form on a phone. Before (14 fields): title, first name, last name, email, confirm email, phone, address line 1, address line 2, city, postcode, date of birth, how did you hear about us, password, confirm password. After (5 fields): full name, email, phone, preferred date, anything we should know. Caption: Baymard Institute: an ideal checkout needs about 7–8 fields; the average has nearly 15.
Highlight: Most forms ask for about twice as much as they need to.
Small fixes that make forms kinder
The encouraging thing about forms is that improving them rarely requires a new website. Most of the fixes are small and can be made in an afternoon.
- Question every field. For each one, ask: do we need this to complete the task, right now? If not, remove it or ask for it later, once the customer is already committed.
- Let people buy without an account. Baymard’s data shows forced account creation is one of the most common reasons people abandon. Offer a guest option, and invite people to save their details afterwards.
- Never ask twice. If billing and delivery addresses are usually the same, make that the default.
- Show the full cost early. Unexpected costs at the end are the single biggest reason for abandonment in Baymard’s survey. No one likes a surprise at the till.
- Be forgiving about formats. Accept phone numbers with or without spaces. Don’t make people guess the rules.
- Make errors helpful. If something is wrong, say exactly what and where, in plain language, and keep everything else the customer has typed.
- Test it on a phone. Fill in your own form, on a small screen, with one thumb. If it irritates you, it irritates your customers.
As we explored in UX and UI: What’s the Difference, and Why Should You Care?, forms are where good UI and good UX meet most directly. A form can look perfectly tidy and still be exhausting to complete.
Highlight: Ask only for what you need, only when you need it.
What this means for a small business
Make a list of every form a customer might fill in to do business with you: online checkout, booking request, contact form, quote request, new client questionnaire, even the paper form at reception. Count the fields on each. Then go through them one by one and mark each field as essential, useful later or not really needed. You’ll almost certainly find some that can go.
If you have website analytics, check where people drop out. Many website platforms can show how many people start a form and how many finish it. A big drop at a particular step is a clue worth following. If you don’t have that data, ask a few friends to fill in your forms on their phones while you watch, without helping.
A few questions can help:
- Which fields do we ask for that we never actually use?
- Can someone book or buy without creating an account?
- Do customers see the full cost before they reach the final step?
- How long does our main form take to complete on a phone?
Which brings us back to the customer whose bus arrived at field fourteen. The shop owner will never see her in their sales figures, and that’s exactly what makes form problems so easy to ignore. Lost customers don’t complain. They just don’t arrive. Cutting that form to five fields might not feel like a dramatic business decision, but it could be one of the most profitable things a small business does this year.
Sources
- Baymard Institute, “50 Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics 2026”, last updated 22 September 2025. Source of the 70.22% average, the reasons for abandonment and the form-field benchmarks.
