Reducing the amount of typing a customer has to do at checkout is a goal you should constantly be striving for. There is no point in a customer (let’s say Jonah) having to fill in the name of his city and state when all this information can be obtained from a single zip code. He just types his zip code and his city and state are both detected and filled in automatically.

The more typing he has to do, the higher the chances that he’ll get distracted by something or just give up and abandon his cart.

 

An address finder is preferable

This tip is valid only if you don’t have an Address Finder field and keep the traditional address fields (street, city, state/province, country, zip). It will simplify the checkout form a little. Please see best practice #123 for that better solution.

 

Complex checkouts create abandonments

From the data I found, about 11-12% of people quit because the checkout is too complex / long, so this helps a bit.

According to Baymard’s data however, a whopping 26% of users abandon purchases during the checkout flow solely because the checkout flow was too long or too complex. 

 

Having fewer fields is better

The average store had 14.88 checkout fields in 2016, 12.8 fields in 2018, and we recommend only having 6-8 fields for a guest checkout (including the credit card fields). So, fewer fields is better. And my assumption is that having to fill fewer fields is almost as good as having fewer fields altogether.