Magento Acquired by Ebay

Magento, an incredibly powerful e-commerce content management system, will be acquired by eBay. eBay previously held 49% of Magento, and is acquiring the rest of the company by the third quarter of 2011.

Magento has a reputation for being very user-friendly and highly customizable, as well as powerful enough to be used by some major online retailers, including John Deere, Ford, Nokia, and the NorthFace. It is open source and lots of thrid party developers work on it.

So, where will Magento go from here? Perhaps the future can be seen in the X.Commerce Innovate Conference. According to John Donahoe, president and CEO of eBay:

“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. 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.”

With the face of commerce/e-commerce changing, do you think eBay’s acquisition of Magento is a good thing?