"This platform will first contribute to the normalization of prices."
This is how the Ministry of Trade announced a new website in mid-December National price platforms. Vesna Perinčić, president of the board of the Republican Union of Consumers, said at the time that "we all know that retail chains in the region boycotted this approach because it enabled price comparison." She added that "consumers can now monitor how prices are moving, find out where they can buy products at the best prices, and thus encourage competition among retailers."
However, if you think that you can enter the desired product on the state's website and really get the listed prices in every retail chain in Serbia - don't get excited in advance. Because the site is not capable of such a "sophisticated" task.
"The online price comparison system in stores is a great thing in principle," Dragovan Milićević, former state secretary at the Ministry of Trade, told Vreme. "I myself asked for such a system 12 years ago when I was in the position of public secretary, but the Ministry looked at me as if I was asking them to build a space shuttle."
We don't have that.
Milićević calls the site that Serbia eventually got "a raw database where you have thousands of products that are impossible to easily compare."
"It seems that the state has not developed sufficiently developed software through which all barcodes are identical, so consumers can type in the product they are interested in and immediately see where it is the cheapest," explains Milićević. "Their database is not for analysis, because you need to open 17 retail chains and search them all on foot."
The portal works by listing 21 store chains and when you enter one, you can only see the prices in that store. In principle, comparison is only possible if you have paper and pencil with the site, or you remember very well, and then you go out of that data and find an identical product through the barcode or name and then see how much it costs in another store. To compare how much coffee from one producer costs in several stores - you need about ten minutes.
The problem is that different producers have the same food with different names, which makes the search even more difficult. Because, somewhere the flour type 400 is simply listed, and somewhere there are several names of the manufacturer, so it is not clear whether it is the same product. Also, we found pudding under flour, but we were unable to determine whether the pudding was also placed under sweet products, because it took us three minutes just to scroll through the table with sweets, because in larger stores there are about 1.500 products in one table.
Cooperation with merchants
Creation of the entire site and cooperation with merchants it may have been made more difficult by the state regulation on the limitation of margins in trade chains. "Vreme" already wrote about the fact that this website about prices was presented in mid-November at the meeting of Minister of Trade Jagoda Lazarevic with small traders at the Chamber of Commerce.
At that time, for three hours, small traders presented the problems they had to the minister after the regulation that was pompously disclosed by Aleksandar Vučić, limiting the margins to hundreds of products.
However, when Jagoda Lazarevic spoke for the pro-government agency about this meeting, nothing was heard. She told Tanjug that traders were actually only presented with a platform where they could see product prices.
"It is something that is very useful, and it will be especially so when the database is publicly available and will be able to be used by all our citizens," said Lazarevic.
