Apparently, acquiring a minority stake in open source ecommerce platform Magento for more than $22 million last year wasn’t enough for eBay.
The online auction site announced this week that it has agreed to buy the rest of the company and will own 100 percent of Magento’s outstanding shares once the transaction is completed. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Analysts expect eBay to fold Magento into its own, newly created integrated open commerce platform group called X.Commerce. X.Commerce combines several eBay assets, as well as partner technologies, to form a robust developer community that merchants and retailers can use as a resource.
eBay will unveil more information about the new service in mid-October during the X.Commerce Innovate conference in San Francisco. For now, you can read more about X.Commerce at www.x.com, the site that formerly hosted the PayPal Developers program.
“Technology-driven innovation is blurring the lines between online and offline commerce, changing the way consumers shop, and enabling retailers of all sizes to benefit from the latest innovations from the developer community,” said John Donahoe, eBay president.
“The feedback we’ve heard from external developers has been clear — they don’t just want payments or an ecommerce site; they want access to a full set of commerce capabilities to build complete shopping experiences for merchants. We believe the acquisition of Magento and creation of our X.Commerce group will enable us to meet developers’ needs and drive global commerce innovation for retailers and consumers.”
Magento, based in Los Angeles, employs nearly 300 people. Its platform, which serves tens of thousands of retailers around the globe and is supported by a worldwide community of solution partners and third-party developers, is a feature-rich and enterprise-class commerce solution offering merchants a high level of flexibility and control over the catalog, content, functionality and user experience of their online store.
eBay will also get Magento Go, the company’s hosted software-as-a-service solution that provides e-commerce tools for small and growing retailers, as part of the deal. Magento Go operates similarly to Yahoo Stores and eBay’s own ProStores web-hosting solution but doesn’t charge commission fees.
Thoughts? Leave us a comment below!
