Rakuten is one step closer to its goal of creating a global shopping platform, announcing on Thursday it was acquiring French shopping site PriceMinister for 200 million euros. The news comes one month after Rakuten announced it was acquiring Buy.com for $250 million.

The PriceMinister Group was founded in France in 2000 and consists of five business lines: Guaranteed Buying and Selling (marketplace), Automobile (classifieds), Travel (price comparison), Real estate (classifieds) and E-mail Marketing. It has 12 million members, over 100,000 active sellers and over 21,000 merchants offering over 160 million products. PriceMinister also has an established presence in Spain and the United Kingdom.

Rakuten is based in Japan with 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

Rakuten is expected to close the PriceMinister acquisition in July.