Just in time for the looming holiday season, Yahoo has launched a beta of the redesigned checkout process for its e-commerce platform for merchants, Yahoo Merchant Solutions, Internet Retailer writes. The Yahoo platform is used for checkout on some 35,000 e-commerce sites. The improvements are specifically geared toward boosting conversion rates and reducing shopping cart abandonment, and are based on extensive research of merchant preferences and online consumer shopping behavior, according to Yahoo.

The redesign gives merchants more control over checkout page content and fields so they can collect information unique to their business, determine how and where fields are displayed on the page, and offer better help resources for shoppers during checkout.

New features include single or multi-page checkout options, new shipping and coupon calculators for determining the entire cost of a purchase at the beginning or end of checkout, and the ability for merchants to customize the visual design of the checkout page.