February 9, 2026
By Marcus Feldt
4 min read
The quiet cost of a checkout that asks too much
Every optional field in a checkout has a price. Here is how to work out what yours are costing you.
Every field in a checkout has a price, and almost nobody measures it. The field costs a few seconds of attention, a small amount of doubt, and — on a phone, on a bad connection, at the end of a long day — a share of the people who were about to pay you.
Ask for what you need to ship the order
Start from the shipping label and work backwards. Anything that is not on the label, or required to take the money, is a question you are asking out of habit. Company name, second address line, date of birth, "how did you hear about us" — each one is defensible on its own, and together they are the reason the basket was abandoned.
The cheapest conversion work available to most shops is deleting fields.
Measure it before you argue about it
Instrument the checkout field by field: where people stop, where they correct themselves, where they switch to a different device. One retailer we worked with found that a single optional "company" field was costing them more completed orders than their entire abandoned-basket email programme was recovering.