eBay Acquires Open Source Ecommerce Company Magento

Ebay announced Monday that it has agreed to acquire Magento Inc., the company behind the open source ecommerce platform Magento.

In the announcement, eBay said that Magento will join the company’s new X.Commerce initiative. X.Commerce is eBay’s integrated open source platform group that will be revealed to developers in more depth in October.

On the Magento blog, CEO and co-founder Roy Rubin posted about the sale. Rubin writes that “it’s too soon to know all the details” but following the close of the sale, “Magento will continue to operate out of Los Angeles, with Yoav Kutner and me as its leaders.”

Magento also posted a FAQ [PDF] page for its customers, but at least to us, this did little to clarify what will actually happen to Magento moving forward and left us with more questions.

Although Magento will continue to operate out of Los Angeles and its staff there and in Ukraine have been retained, there was no real answer to the question “will Magento continue as a standalone product.” Instead, it looks like what is now Magento will become a big part of eBay’s upcoming X.Commerce platform.

Magento will continue to work with its existing partners and customers of its hosted and supported solutions. As for the open source Magento Community Edition, not much is known what it means for the product at this point.

For eBay, the move is interesting, especially in conjunction with PayPal and the various PayPal X initiatives. Magento is an opportunity for eBay to offer businesses a soup-to-nuts ecommerce solution, from hosting to payment processing to mobile.

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