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Groupon is stepping up its commitment to Russia and the country’s largest internet group, Mail.ru. The e-commerce site announced on Tuesday it would begin offering deals on Odnoklassniki, one of Mail.ru’s social networking sites, allowing customers to make one-click purchases and follow friends’ shopping habits without ever having to leave the Odnoklassniki site.

The partnership, Mail.ru announced with little modesty, would be the “first project of its kind worldwide. No other social network has ever before realised incentives of this scale in the field of social commerce.”

While the crowing might be over the top, the deal is a significant one for Mail.ru: After years of cultivating relationships with Silicon Valley groups, its cross-border friendships are starting to pay off.

Mail.ru owned a 5 per cent stake in Groupon at the time of its initial public offering in December, and participated in Groupon’s $950m round of financing in January, while Digital Sky Technologies Global, Mail.ru’s former holding company for foreign assets, also holds a stake in the US e-commerce group.

Investors took a big bet on Mail.ru when they valued the company at 32 times earnings in it November London listing – and many were willing to do so. (The $1bn offering was 20 times oversubscribed, and shares have risen nearly 25 per cent since the flotation.) Deals like the collaborative partnership with Groupon will reassure investors that there is money to be made not just from the growing Russian-language internet world, but from Mail.ru’s tie-ups with US social networking peers, including Facebook and Zynga, the online gaming company.

For Groupon, the deal is not half bad either, as it fights to ensure it is the first of its kind to gain a presence — and a name — in emerging markets. In the past two months alone, Groupon has announced plans to expand into India, Israel, South Africa, Taiwan, the Philippines and Singapore.

In August it bought Darberry, a Russian e-commerce start-up that became profitable on $250m and will soon be available in 30 cities across the country.

Critics have questioned whether Mail.ru, with its sky-high $5.7bn valuation, will actually put its money where its mouth is. If the Russian internet giant can orchestrate deals like the Groupon one, naysayers may find they have less and less to talk about.

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