Serbia's Big Retailers Must Publish Online Price Lists
Large retailers with revenue above three billion dinars start publishing digital price lists for every store on September 1, with price history archived on Serbia's Open Data Portal.
Starting tomorrow, September 1, Serbia’s large retailers must publish their price lists in digital form, broken down by individual store, on their own websites and on the state’s Open Data Portal. The obligation applies to retailers that posted sales revenue above three billion dinars (about 25.6 million euros) in the previous business year, and it rests on the new Consumer Protection Law, published in Official Gazette of the Republic of Serbia No. 35/2026 and fully in force since August 2.
The specifics are set out in the Rulebook on the Conditions, Content and Manner of Publishing Price Lists, which appeared in Official Gazette of the Republic of Serbia No. 76/2026 on Friday, signed by Minister of Internal and Foreign Trade Jagoda Lazarevic. She had flagged the rollout two weeks earlier, on August 19, while presenting the Inflation Report at the National Bank of Serbia. “There will be no delays,” Lazarevic said at the time.
What has to be in the price list
The obligation covers mostly food items, along with a handful of household chemical and hygiene categories:
- milk, dairy products, and eggs
- bread and pastries, meat and fish, fruit and vegetables
- sugar, honey, flour, pasta, and rice
- oils and fats, salt and spices, coffee and tea
- non-alcoholic and alcoholic beverages
- household chemicals, paper goods, cosmetics, and personal hygiene products
- baby food, diapers, and pet food
Every listed item must carry the product name, brand, barcode, unit of measure, selling price, price per unit, VAT rate, and the type of price list it belongs to. If an item is sold under a promotional discount, the list must also show the reduced price and the exact start and end dates of the promotion. Retailers submit the data in a single combined CSV file, with a fixed filename that carries no date, and the price list updates in real time: a new version goes up whenever any item’s price changes.
One distinctive feature of the system is that old data is never deleted. Snapshots of the price list as it stood on the first day of each month stay permanently available on the portal, so a shopper can compare today’s price for the same product against what it cost a month or two earlier.
The Trade Law also protects buyers at the shelf and the register: a promotional discount can only undercut the lowest price the item carried over the previous month, which is meant to stop retailers from inflating prices right before a fake sale. And if the price on the shelf or website differs from what rings up at the register, the buyer is entitled to have the item sold at the lower, displayed price, not merely to put it back.
Vesna Perincic of the Republic Consumers’ Union says the change works in shoppers’ favor:
“The goal is for prices to be more accessible to consumers and for them to be able to compare them more easily.”
The data will also live on data.gov.rs, where each obligated retailer keeps its own dataset without deleting earlier postings. For the first time, that gives shoppers a way to compare the price of the same product across multiple retailers, and to track how it has moved over time, without ever having to walk into a store.
