Serbia’s digital market is no longer a narrow IT outsourcing story. It is becoming one of the country’s main export engines, a consumer-payments market, a retail-transformation channel and an infrastructure layer for tax, finance, logistics and public administration. The clearest signal is ICT exports: Serbia’s official 2025 ICT services exports reached €4.552bn, up 10% year on year, while the ICT services surplus reached €3.529bn. December 2025 alone delivered €471mn of ICT exports, the highest monthly figure reported in the official release.
The digital industry is therefore splitting into two layers. The first is export-oriented software, cloud, gaming, testing, customer platforms, AI, data engineering and R&D services. The second is the domestic digitalisation layer: e-commerce, online payments, e-invoicing, ERP integration, fiscal systems, digital marketing, fulfilment, cyber security and SME automation. The first layer earns foreign currency; the second layer modernises the local economy.
The demand base is already large. The Statistical Office reports that 90% of individuals used the internet in 2025, 84.7% of internet users had a social-network account, and 90.1% of households had broadband internet. Among enterprises with 10 or more employees, broadband internet usage reached 100%, 81.5% of small enterprises had a website, and 10.1% of companies used artificial-intelligence technology in 2025.
That means Serbia has already passed the basic connectivity stage. The market question is no longer whether consumers and companies are online. The question is whether companies can convert digital presence into sales, payments, repeat purchases, margin control and data-driven operations. Many firms still treat websites as brochures rather than sales infrastructure. That leaves room for agencies, ERP integrators, payment providers, fulfilment operators and performance-marketing specialists.
E-commerce is the most visible growth channel. The National Bank of Serbia reported 110.6mn online purchases using payment cards and e-money in 2025, up 34.3% from 82.4mn in 2024 and 5.2 times higher than the 21.2mn purchases recorded in 2020. The average daily volume reached more than 303,000 online purchases. At the end of 2025, Serbia had 5,632 domestic online stores, 906 more than a year earlier and 2.8 times the number recorded at the end of 2020.
The value picture is equally important. Online dinar purchases reached 78.6mn transactions worth RSD 237.4bn in 2025, while euro-denominated online purchases reached 23.8mn transactions worth €1.024bn. Dollar-denominated purchases fell in number to 6.1mn, but their value still rose to $244.5mn. The NBS data excludes cash-on-delivery transactions, which means the visible card-and-e-money market understates the full e-commerce economy.
Private-market estimates place Serbian e-commerce revenue at around $916mn in 2025, with expected 5–10% growth in 2026 and an online retail share still only around 5–10%. ECDB identifies Hobby & Leisure as the largest category, with 28% of market revenue, while cash on delivery remains the leading payment method and WooCommerce is the most common shop software among Serbian online retailers.
The market is therefore growing, but still structurally immature. Serbia has rising online purchases, more stores, strong mobile adoption and more digital payments, yet trust, checkout friction, delivery cost, returns management and COD dependency remain decisive. This is why e-commerce winners will not only be retailers. The stronger business models will be around payments, fulfilment, last-mile logistics, conversion optimisation, marketplace integration, customer support automation, product-data management, fraud prevention and cross-border checkout.
Payments are one of the strongest trend lines. Serbia’s IPS instant-payment system processed 50.7mn instant payments in the first half of 2025, up 24.8% year on year, with total value rising 37.1% to RSD 628.7bn. IPS supports QR payments, mobile transfers, in-store payments and online payments, and the NBS lists Ananas.rs among platforms supporting instant payments.
Cross-border checkout is becoming a new opportunity. In April 2026, NALED reported that the National Bank of Serbia confirmed domestic e-commerce merchants can charge non-resident customers in foreign currency for online sales, removing an important practical barrier for Serbian companies selling abroad. This matters because forcing foreign buyers into dinar checkout at the final stage increased cart abandonment and reduced trust.
The strongest e-commerce niches through 2026–2028 are likely to be consumer electronics, fashion, hobby and leisure, pharmacy and care products, grocery and quick commerce, homeware, DIY, online education, ticketing, tourism services, B2B procurement platforms, and export-oriented D2C brands. Food and grocery will grow where delivery density exists. Electronics and home equipment will remain strong because consumers compare prices aggressively online. Fashion will grow, but return management and sizing logistics will remain margin-sensitive.
Serbia’s digital industry also has an infrastructure advantage. The government has invested in AI, the Kragujevac State Data Centre, cloud infrastructure and supercomputing capacity. The Office for IT and eGovernment says the National AI Platform currently includes 4 Nvidia DGX A100 systems, 32 GPUs, 150TB of storage and 5 PetaFlops of AI performance, with an upgrade to 6 Nvidia DGX H200 systems, 48 GPUs, 120TB of additional storage and 32 PetaFlops planned for availability during 2025. A third supercomputer is planned for 2026.
That AI infrastructure creates a second growth wave for domestic providers: AI-enabled customer service, demand forecasting, warehouse optimisation, fraud detection, personalised offers, automated accounting, document processing, pricing tools and marketing automation. In a market where many SMEs still lack advanced digital capacity, AI adoption will not arrive as abstract “innovation”. It will arrive as cheaper content production, faster invoice processing, automated customer support, product description generation, chat commerce and inventory forecasting.
Foreign R&D presence strengthens the ecosystem. The U.S. Commercial Service lists Oracle, Rivian, Microsoft, NCR Atleos, NCR Voyix, Cisco and IBM among major companies with R&D centres or campuses in Serbia. It also notes that Serbia’s technology companies produce software for agriculture, medicine, tracking, cloud applications, online games and testing, with about 115,000 people employed in the ICT sector.
The domestic challenge is SME conversion. The European Commission’s 2025 Serbia report notes that Serbia’s digital transformation is well under way, digital government services are already close to the EU average in many areas, and businesses are relatively active in e-commerce. But it also flags uneven rural connectivity and says SME digital uptake remains constrained by weak support mechanisms that fail to turn regulatory improvements into business practice.
This is where the commercial opportunity sits. Serbia needs less “website creation” and more digital operating systems for companies: webshops connected to inventory, payments connected to accounting, invoices connected to SEF, customer data connected to marketing, logistics connected to real-time delivery tracking, and management reporting connected to actual sales and cash flow. Digital agencies that remain focused only on design will face pricing pressure. Agencies that can deliver revenue, automation and compliance will gain pricing power.
E-invoicing is part of the same market. Serbia’s Electronic Invoice System became mandatory for private-sector B2B electronic invoice issuance and storage from 1 January 2023, while the official e-invoice portal provides API instructions, XML standards, VAT recording tools and technical manuals. This has created a large demand pool for software providers, ERP consultants, accounting-tech platforms and API integrators.
The winning position in Serbia is therefore a hybrid one: digital commerce plus payments plus compliance plus data. Retailers need webshops and marketplaces, but also SEF-compatible invoicing, VAT evidence, return documentation, card/e-money reconciliation, customer analytics, warehouse control and performance marketing. Exporting digital companies need foreign-currency collection, subscription billing, contracts, data protection and cross-border tax documentation. Industrial firms need B2B portals, procurement automation and supplier data control.
The risk side is clear. The market still has COD dependency, fragmented logistics, high cart abandonment, weak customer-service standards, uneven SME digital skills, imported platform dependency and pressure from international sellers. Local retailers must compete not only with Serbian rivals, but with cross-border platforms, foreign marketplaces and global brands able to absorb lower margins.
The strongest Serbian digital businesses will not be those that simply “go online”. They will be those that convert digital traffic into controlled transactions, repeat customers, clean documentation, lower working-capital leakage and export-ready payment flows. Serbia’s digital economy is already large enough to matter at macro level; the next phase will decide which companies turn that scale into margin, and which remain trapped in low-value outsourcing, brochure websites and price-driven online retail.
