eBay Inc. today announced that it has agreed to acquire Magento Inc., the creator of Magento, a leading open source ecommerce platform. The deal follows eBay’s acquisition of a minority stake in the company in 2010. Upon closing of the transaction, eBay will own 100% of the outstanding shares of Magento. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to close in Q3 2011.

It was also announced that Magento will join X.Commerce, eBay’s newly created integrated open source platform group. Something I’m particularly interested in. According to today’s announcement, the group is focused on leveraging the company’s assets and partner technologies to build a strong, robust developer community as a resource for merchants and retailers of all sizes. More details will be shared with developers during the X.Commerce Innovate conference on Oct. 12-13 in San Francisco and I’d like to sit down with key members of the group to share more info here with Ink readers too. In the meantime, here is a video message to developers from John Donahoe, CEO, eBay Inc.

A video message to developers from eBay Inc. CEO, John Donahoe

About Magento
The Magento platform serves tens of thousands of merchants worldwide and is supported by a global community of solution partners and third-party developers. Magento is a feature-rich, open-source, enterprise-class commerce solution that offers merchants a high degree of flexibility and control over the user experience, catalog, content and functionality of their online store. Magento Go, the company’s hosted software-as-a-service solution, provides small and growing merchants with the tools to help them succeed online – from payments to inventory management. Magento is a Los Angeles-based company with more than 290 employees.