Japanese firm Rakuten will acquire Buy.com for approximately $250 million through its U.S. subsidiary, Rakuten USA. Buy.com has 14 million customers; combined, the two ecommerce companies will offer over 60 million products from close to 35,000 merchants around the globe.

In Japan, Rakuten has approximately 64 million registered members and sales in 2009 totaled $3.2 billion. Its core business, Rakuten Ichiba, combines shopping and entertainment and is Japan's largest Internet shopping mall, offering over 50 million products by over 33,000 merchants, some of whom have turnover of more than $1 million per month.

Rakuten has more than 6,000 employees and is also engaged in other Internet businesses including travel and financial services. In 2005, Rakuten established a presence in the U.S. through its acquisition of LinkShare, a leading performance marketing company.

"As we evaluated how to accelerate our global expansion, it became clear that a partnership with Buy.com made perfect sense," said Hiroshi Mikitani, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Rakuten. "As a company, Buy.com shares our vision for the future of ecommerce - as a platform to give consumers the best value no matter their location, and to merge shopping with entertainment, and to help retailers build deep and lasting consumer relationships."

Rakuten said it expects to deploy product innovations across its global platform as the two companies merge to empower retailers with unique cross-sale opportunities, and to introduce new sales and marketing programs leveraging collaborative opportunities between its various operating groups.