What the new rules mean for price data
From 17 November thousands of retailers and service providers will publish machine-readable price lists. What this means for those who use the data.
From 17 November 2026 Croatia gets one of the largest open price datasets in Europe. The publishing obligation no longer applies only to retail chains, but to every retailer and service provider with its own website, including the anchor price (sidrena cijena) for each item.
What is required of price lists
Where the problems are in practice
The content is prescribed, but there is no single template. Each business builds its file its own way. From our monitoring so far (as of 8–9 October 2026):
The most common reasons for failure are bot protection, changes to file structure and unreadable formats. Many items have no barcode, so the same product sold by different retailers cannot be linked by a simple match.
The new deadline changes data freshness
Under the draft ordinance on publishing price lists, a change is recorded by 11:00 on the next working day, and a daily publication without changes is no longer mentioned. If this stays in the final text, the price list you see today may reflect yesterday's prices. For real-time comparisons that is a significant difference.
Who benefits from this
They all need the same thing: data collected once, cleaned and available through a stable interface.
Sources
This article is for information only and is not legal advice. Check the final text of the ordinance in the Official Gazette (Narodne novine).