What you need for an online shop in Croatia

Most guides to opening a web shop stop at “choose a platform”. The legal part, which is the part that actually carries the fines, is usually skipped or out of date. This piece covers the position in 2026, after Fiscalisation 2.0 came into force and after the changes to the Croatian Consumer Protection Act. It is not a substitute for an accountant, but once you have read it you will know what to ask one.

First: the name you sell under

A web shop is not a legal form of its own. You sell either as a sole trader or as a company, with a registered activity that covers distance selling. If you already run a sole trader business for something else, check with your accountant whether your registered activity also covers selling online. That is the most common oversight at the start.

The threshold for entering the VAT system is 60,000 euro of annual turnover. Below it you can trade without VAT, but that also affects when the obligation to issue eInvoices catches up with you, which we come to below.

Fiscalisation 2.0: what changed

Until the end of 2025, fiscalisation (the Croatian system of reporting every invoice to the Tax Administration in real time) applied in practice to cash and card. From 1 January 2026 the rule is simpler and wider: every invoice is fiscalised, whatever the payment method. A transfer made through internet banking is no longer an exception.

For a web shop that means every order from a private customer ends in a fiscalised invoice, reported as it happens. This is not something you do by hand at the end of the day. It has to be built into the shop, or into a system the shop calls.

For end customers, meaning private individuals, an eInvoice is not mandatory; fiscalisation in retail applies instead. For business customers it works differently: if you are VAT registered, an eInvoice (a structured electronic invoice, not a PDF) is mandatory for invoices inside Croatia. If you are not VAT registered, that obligation reaches you on 1 January 2027.

Taking payment, and what comes with it

The payment methods you offer are not only a technical decision. Each one comes with its own paperwork.

• Bank transfer. The simplest to start with, but the customer has to go and make the payment, so a share of the orders falls away. The invoice is fiscalised all the same.
• Cash on delivery. Popular with Croatian customers who do not trust paying online. It carries the risk of parcels nobody collects.
• Card. The best conversion, but it needs a contract with a provider, a check on the company and 3-D Secure. The fee per transaction comes out of your margin.

For domestic customers the usual choice is WSPay or CorvusPay with a Croatian bank; for international customers, Stripe. It does not have to be one or the other, and for shops with a mixed audience it often makes sense to offer two.

Terms of business and the right to return

A customer has the right to withdraw from the contract within 14 days of receiving the goods, without giving a reason. That much is widely known. What gets overlooked more often is the penalty for getting it wrong: if you do not give the customer the standard withdrawal form, the window stretches from 14 days to 12 months. One document you never published turns two weeks into a year.

Terms of business have to be available before the order, not after it, and they have to say plainly who is selling, how payment works, how long delivery takes, how goods are returned and where a complaint goes. Alongside them come a privacy policy and a cookie notice, because a shop processes personal data by definition.

New in 2026: the cancellation button

Amendments to the Croatian Consumer Protection Act introduced Article 81.a, which brings Directive (EU) 2023/2673 into national law. The rule is short and easy to remember: if the customer could enter into the contract in one click, they have to be able to cancel it in one click.

This lands hardest on shops with subscriptions, memberships and services that renew automatically. If the customer subscribed in two clicks, you cannot ask them to post the cancellation or to ring during office hours. The button has to be visible and just as easy to reach as the one they subscribed with.

Fines for breaching the consumer protection rules run from roughly 1,330 to 26,540 euro, depending on the offence. Not the place to economise.

The list before you put the shop live

A practical running order. If anything here is still open, the shop is not ready to take its first order.

• A registered activity that covers distance selling
• Fiscalisation of invoices sorted, built into the shop rather than bolted on afterwards
• Checked with your accountant whether the eInvoice obligation already applies to you
• A contract with a payment provider, and a test run that includes a declined card
• Terms of business, privacy policy and cookie notice published
• The withdrawal form available to download
• A cancellation button if you sell subscriptions
• Shipping prices stated clearly before the payment step
• A contact the customer can actually reach you on

The technical part of this is our job. For the bookkeeping and tax side, take an accountant who has already run a web shop; it is not the same as running a sole trader business that issues ten invoices a month. For how the build looks from our side, see the web shop page, and if you are still putting a budget together, there is how much a web shop costs. If you already have a shop, the first question is redesign or a new site.