If you have a clear call to action on your site which says, Sign up for Our Free Webinar!” Lets say you ask the users for name, e-mail, and phone number (3 fields) in order to register for the free webinar. If you changed that form (removed the phone field) you would increase your conversion rate by 20%. Adding more fields would drop your conversion rate. Every step you force a user through adds “friction” to the transaction. Remove friction and increase the conversion. Personal information carries a higher friction value – so you better be giving something valuable away in exchange for the personal information.

Obviously some transactions require lots of information (credit card transactions, etc…), the key is to make sure you’re asking for only exactly what you need, in a form that is brilliantly easy, and provide all the information you can (auto fill from profile is the user is known), etc… From a web to print standpoint, can you imagine the differences in conversion rate between a solution that has authentication integration (e.g. LDAP) vs. one that requires a separate registration and login? If the addition of a single field can drop conversion rates by 20%, can you imagine what a complete extra process including remembering yet another registration and login could do to web to print user adoption?

Can you expand or explain further the sentence: “For every field you add to a form in an ecommerce user experience, your conversion drops 20%.” ?

As I read that logic is means that a form that captures (5) pieces of information would yield a 100% failure rate when it comes to conversion I’m aware of very few commerce applications that don’t have at least that number.