EBay said on Monday it planned to pay $1.3 billion in cash and $1.3 billion in stock for the online communications company. It will make a further payout of up to $1.5 billion if certain financial targets are met.

The deal will cut eBay's earnings by about a cent per share until the end of 2006 before beginning to boost eBay's profitability, Chief Financial Officer Rajiv Dutta said.

Its shares fell 1.81 percent to $37.93 in early trading on the Nasdaq exchange, after falling 4 percent last week when investors became concerned that eBay might pay too much, giving eBay a market capitalization of about $52 billion.

EBay is renowned for its Internet marketplace linking more than 150 million buyers and sellers, who currently exchange about 5 million emails per day. It hopes that offering free Skype calls within eBay will smooth the way for more deals to go through, and let the company charge merchants for calls that lead to sales.

Skype already leads the booming voice-over-Internet (VoIP) market, which is seen as a threat to traditional phone companies and is being aggressively targeted by online powerhouses such as AOL (TWX.N: Quote, Profile, Research) Yahoo (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research), Google (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and Microsoft

(MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research).

Chief Executive Meg Whitman said that Skype had a considerable head start.

"We think Skype has an enormous lead -- 150,000 new users a day, and technology that is generations ahead of where the new entrants are," she said. "And when people are using your brandname as a verb, that is incredibly powerful."

Skype expects revenues of $60 million this year and more than $200 million in 2006, but has yet to turn a profit. In two years, Skype has attracted 54 million members to its free and low-cost Internet-based voice service and is on track to roughly double in size within a year.