Does asking for too much information cause abandonment?

As an e-commerce store owner, I've been wrestling with a frustrating challenge that's been silently killing my conversion rates. Every time a customer lands on my checkout page, I watch them hesitate, scroll back and forth, and then mysteriously disappear. At first, I thought it was just part of doing business online, but the numbers told a different story. My analytics showed that for every 100 potential customers who added items to their cart, only 20-25 were actually completing the purchase. The culprit? Our checkout form. We were asking for what felt like a doctoral dissertation's worth of information—shipping details, billing address, phone number, preferred communication method, how they heard about us, their grandmother's maiden name... okay, maybe not that last one, but you get the point. Each additional field felt like another nail in our conversion coffin. I started suspecting that our well-intentioned desire to collect comprehensive customer data was actually driving customers away. They weren't abandoning their purchase because they didn't want the product, but because the path to getting it felt more like an interrogation than a seamless shopping experience. The friction was real, and it was costing us serious revenue. I needed a solution that could help me understand exactly how much information is too much and find a way to streamline our checkout process without losing the critical data we needed.