Price lists of retail chains in Serbia weekly on Open Data Portal - This data is publicly available from today

All retail chains in Serbia will publish data on price lists every week on the National Open Data Portal (data.gov.rs), as stipulated, among other things, by the new Regulation on Special Conditions for Conducting Trade for Certain Types of Goods, the Office for IT and eGovernment announced. As of today, product prices in retail chains, a detailed overview of product prices by date, price movements over time, as well as a list of the largest price increases and decreases, are publicly available on this platform.

The Regulation was presented by the Minister of Domestic and Foreign Trade Jagoda Lazarevic and the Director of the Office for IT and eGovernment Mihailo Jovanovic, who also presented the new digital platform “Price lists according to the Regulation.”

The Minister specified that the platform was accessed via the website of the Ministry of Domestic and Foreign Trade (must.gov.rs) and that citizens would be able to choose the retail chain, product category, product, brand and price on the platform, as well as compare prices in retail chains. According to her, this is a project that represents a major step forward in the availability of information to consumers about prices and further stabilization of the market.

- We have fulfilled what we promised. We have done something very important that will be recognized by a wide public. The idea was to provide citizens with one place where a huge amount of information will flow, the price lists of all the leading retail chains covered by the regulation - said Lazarevic.

Jovanovic pointed out that, as a result of the joint work of the Ministry of Trade and the Office for IT and eGovernment, 27 retail chains would regularly publish their price lists on the Open Data Portal from that day.

- All weekly price lists from September 1 to the present will be available on the Portal, as well as price lists for three reference dates – April 1, August 1 and August 31. In this way, citizens can follow the complete history of prices, including all items, categories and stores of all chains. In addition, retail chains are obliged to update and upload current price lists every Monday by 2 pm, thus ensuring that the public always has access to the latest and most complete data - said Jovanovic.

He emphasizes that today represents a significant step forward in the development of the open data ecosystem in Serbia, because for the first time, data that does not originate from state institutions, but from the private sector, is being published on the Open Data Portal.

He also reminds that the Office for IT and eGovernment established the Open Data Portal eight years ago, on which more than 150 institutions actively publish more than 6,500 data sets.