NEW YORK (Bloomberg) - EBay Inc. will cut 10 percent of its workforce and make two acquisitions after sales growth slowed at its Internet marketplace unit.

EBay, trying to revive shares trading at an almost six-year low, will purchase online-credit service Bill Me Later for $945 million and merge it with the PayPal payment division. The company also agreed on Monday to buy Denmark's Den Blaa Avis, getting its newspaper and the country's two biggest classified websites for 2.1 billion kroner ($390 million) in cash.

CEO John Donahoe's purchase of Bill Me Later indicates an increasing reliance on payment services to boost revenue as it competes with Amazon.com Inc. About 1,000 employees and 600 temporary workers will be cut, leading to annual savings of about $150 million, after third-quarter sales rose at the slowest pace since 1998.

"EBay is largely a virtual business and it doesn't have a lot of customer-service operations," Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein & Co. in New York, said in an interview. "It probably had too many people."

The job cuts will cost San Jose, California-based EBay $70 million to $80 million before taxes, most of which will be recorded in the fourth quarter. As for Bill Me Later, which gives user the option to defer payments, the purchase will start adding to earnings in 2011 after reducing adjusted profit by three cents to five cents a share in the fourth quarter and another six cents in 2009.

"PayPal and Bill Me Later belong together," Mr. Donahoe said on a conference call. "We're going to continue to invest in PayPal to extend that leadership position because we think it has enormous potential, and almost a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to extend that lead."

The purchase of Danish classified sites Den Blaa Avis and BilBasen will give EBay a combined 186 million sales postings per month.

EBay's online classifieds business is expanding via local markets, and with $260 million in sales, generates "three to four times more revenue than Craigslist," Mr. Donahoe said.