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Anchor prices, 4 min read,

Croatia's Anchor Prices From 17 November: What Your Website Must Show and How to Build It

Every price now needs an anchor price beside it, and a website needs a machine-readable price list. What the rules require and how to set it up.

From 17 November 2026 every retailer and service provider in Croatia must show a so-called anchor price next to the selling price. The deadline was originally 1 October; the government postponed it after requests from craftspeople and retailers. The obligation has not been dropped, only moved.

For most businesses this is more than a new shelf label. The anchor price must also appear on the website, in the online shop and in advertising, and anyone with a website must publish a daily price list in a form a computer can read automatically.

What the decisions require

There are two government decisions, published in Narodne novine 101/2026: the Decision on displaying an additional price and the Decision on publishing price lists of products and services. In the official text the anchor price is called the additional price.

  • The reference date is 10 September 2026. The anchor price is the price the product or service had on that day.
  • For six product groups it is 2 May 2025. These are food, drinks, cosmetics, cleaning products, toiletries and household goods, which were already covered by the first measure in 2025.
  • A sale price cannot be the anchor. If the product was on sale on the reference day, the regular price applies.
  • The anchor price does not change. The selling price may go up or down; the anchor stays the same while the measure is in force.
  • It must be clear, visible and legible, next to the current price, at the point of sale and in all advertising, websites included.

The anchor price is not the same as the lowest price in the last 30 days, which the Consumer Protection Act requires for price reductions. When a product is on sale, both obligations apply.

Under the Act on Extraordinary Price Control Measures, fines for sole traders range from €1,000 to €20,000, and are higher for companies.

A machine-readable price list

The second decision applies to those with a website. A table or list of prices on a page is not enough: the price list must be a CSV or XML file that software can download and process.

  • Products: a new price list every working day, by 8:00 at the latest, even if nothing has changed.
  • Services: a new price list at every price change, by 8:00 on the day of the change.
  • Archive: every published price list must remain available for 30 days.
  • Product data: name, code, brand, unit of measure, retail price, special form of sale if any, anchor price, barcode and availability.
  • Service data: name, retail price, special form of sale and anchor price.

Some questions still await official interpretation from the Ministry of Economy, for example what counts as an established website and how to treat products that were not on offer on the reference day. Before the final setup it is worth checking the text of the decisions and the latest clarifications.

What it looks like in the system

The key is that the anchor price is a separate data field, not a number someone types into the product description. Then it is entered once, does not change by accident and can be printed everywhere it is needed.

  1. Add fields for the anchor price and its date. Each product or service gets anchor_price and anchor_date (10 September 2026 or 2 May 2025). The field is filled once and then locked against edits.
  2. Take reference-day prices from data, not memory. The most reliable sources are an export from the till or ERP, a backup of the shop database or an archive of price lists. Replace that day's sale prices with the regular ones.
  3. Show it everywhere a price appears. The product page, category listings, on-site search, the basket if it shows prices, and advertising feeds such as Google Shopping. Category listings are the place most often forgotten.
  4. Do not mark it up as an old price. The anchor price is not a discount. If you mark it as a StrikethroughPrice in structured data, Google will show it as a reduction, which misleads the customer. The Offer markup keeps only the real selling price.
  5. Let a machine build the price list. A scheduled job on the server (cron) generates a new file from the database every morning before 8:00 with a timestamp in its name, publishes it at a stable address and deletes files older than 30 days. Saving a spreadsheet by hand every day gets forgotten sooner or later.

For WooCommerce, Shopify and similar systems this is an extra field and a small template change. Ready-made plugins that promise to handle everything are worth checking before you switch them on: which fields they output, whether they generate the price list daily and where they publish it.

In short

By 17 November you need three things: the anchor price as a separate, locked field on every product and service, that price shown wherever the selling price appears, and, if you have a website, an automatic CSV or XML price list that is refreshed every morning and kept for 30 days. The sooner the reference-day prices are pulled from the till or the database, the less work is left for the final week.

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