E-commerce in Serbia 2026 — what you need to know before launching an online store

The Serbian e-commerce market in 2025–2026 has reached a stage where launching an online store is no longer a competitive advantage — it is the minimum to enter the game. But between 'I have a webshop' and 'my webshop earns money' there is a large gap that can be bridged, if you start with the right expectations and technical foundations.

Platform: WooCommerce (WordPress) remains the dominant choice for the Serbian market for one reason — local payment gateways (Banca Intesa, Raiffeisen, NLB, OTP) have mature WooCommerce plugins. Shopify is an excellent platform globally, but integration with Serbian banks requires additional development or a third-party intermediary. For clients starting out with fewer than 200 products: WooCommerce with good hosting and an optimised theme. For scalable operations with thousands of SKUs and custom logic: headless e-commerce on Next.js with a custom backend or Shopify Plus.

Payments: online card payments in Serbia go through the 3DS2 standard and require a contract with a bank (not directly with Visa or Mastercard). Alongside cards, IPS (instant payment) is growing quickly and increasingly chosen by users. Cash on delivery still accounts for a significant portion of orders in the B2C segment, especially for lower basket values. Do not remove cash on delivery before seeing real data from your segment.

Logistics: D Express, City Express, and Post Serbia dominate. Integrations exist for all of them, but plugin quality varies — before launch, test the entire flow from order to printing the delivery note. Product returns are a legal obligation for physical persons (14 days without reason for online purchases) — the returns policy page must be clear and prominently linked.

SEO for e-commerce: category and URL structure must be planned before development, not after. Filter pages (e.g. '/shoes/womens/red') must have a canonical tag or noindex strategy — without this, crawl budget is wasted on thousands of URL combinations. Product descriptions written by AI without editing are now detected by Google's classifier and rank worse than unique content.

The legal side: e-commerce in Serbia is regulated by the Law on Electronic Commerce and the Law on Consumer Protection. Mandatory requirements include: seller identification, prices including VAT, delivery information before order confirmation, returns and complaints policy, and a functional order cancellation mechanism. Do not leave this for 'after launch' — inspection authorities exist and active oversight is in place.

Feather Studio has worked on e-commerce projects for B2C and B2B segments in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the USA. For a concrete estimate of platform, integration, and scope — book a call or see our services.