A woman pushing a stroller walks in front of a Rakuten Cafe in Tokyo last month. Reuters
TOKYO—Japan's biggest online shopping mall, Rakuten Inc., has reached a basic agreement to buy U.S. cashback-shopping website operator Ebates for about ¥100 billion ($952 million) to better access U.S. consumers and grow abroad, a person familiar with the matter said Sunday.
The deal, which is expected to be announced this week, is part of a multiyear push by Rakuten to raise its profile overseas and take on far bigger rivals such as Amazon.comInc. and China's e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
Winning new shoppers abroad is crucial for Rakuten. About 95% of its e-commerce revenues are earned in Japan, and its dominance at home is under threat from both Amazon and Yahoo Japan Corp.
Rakuten issued a statement over the weekend saying that the two were in talks and that they would make an announcement when an official decision had been made. The deal was first reported by Japan's Nikkei financial newspaper Saturday.
Founded in 1998, San Francisco-based Ebates offers coupons and cash rebates to customers who shop at its partner retailers, such as Amazon, Best Buy Co., and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. It has more than 1,700 partners with more than 8 million customers in the U.S., Canada, Korea and China. The company handled $1.6 billion in sales in 2012, the Nikkei said.
Officials at Ebates didn't return calls for comment over the weekend.
The deal underlines Rakuten's global ambitions. Founded in 1997 by chief executiveHiroshi Mikitani, a Harvard-educated former banker, the company has spent billions of dollars on acquisitions to expand its lineup of services. Since 2012, Mr. Mikitani has also mandated that all in-house meetings and memos be in English, to prepare its employees for the push that will make Rakuten a household name world-wide.
For now, most of Rakuten's revenue comes from its 90 million members in Japan, where its services span an online shopping mall with tens of thousands of merchants, a Web-based travel service, an Internet bank, and a baseball team.
The Ebates negotiations amplify Rakuten's increasingly aggressive acquisition strategy. In February, Rakuten spent $905 million on Israeli instant messaging service operator Viber, in hopes that the boost in users would eventually direct more traffic to Rakuten's shopping sites. In August, the company took a more direct shot at the lucrative U.S. market by buying U.S.-based startup Slice, which operates an app that helps users keep track of their online shopping.
Rakuten's past acquisitions include a stake in U.S. online scrapbooking-site Pinterest and the acquisition of Canadian e-book firm Kobo for $315 million in 2012. Later that year, it acquired Spain-based video-on-demand service Wuaki.tv, followed by an acquisition of Singapore-based video site Viki.
If completed, the Ebate deal would be the latest in a race by Asia's Internet companies to snatch up promising technologies and online services in their bids to win users.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and fellow Internet service portal Tencent Inc. have spent billions this year in acquisitions, while Mr. MIkitani's client, Tokyo-based SoftBank Corp., is also bolstering its investment arms in the U.S., Korea, India and in Southeast Asia.