Accepting Online Payments in Serbia: A Friendly Start

So you've decided your business needs to accept payments online. Maybe you've got a shop, maybe you run a studio and want people to pay for sessions in advance, maybe you're just tired of bank transfers and "I'll send it tomorrow, promise." Good news: it's a very solvable problem. Let's walk through it together, no jargon, no pressure.

First, the one distinction that actually matters

When people search for this, they usually land on a pile of companies that all sound the same. Here's the one thing worth understanding before any of the names matter: some companies are the ones actually licensed to move your money, the bank-backed processors Serbia's central bank has approved. Other companies, like us, sit on top of those processors and hand you one simple integration instead of you having to deal with the bank-level plumbing yourself. Think of it the way Stripe works for a US business, or Robokassa for a Russian one: you don't need to become your own bank, you need one connection that already speaks to the banks for you.

Neither approach is better in the abstract. What matters is what you actually need: if you want the absolute lowest-level, most custom setup and you have a technical team to build it, going direct makes sense. If you want to plug in a payment method, have your fiscal receipts sorted automatically, and get back to running your actual business, an integration layer is probably what you're looking for.

What "accepting payments" actually involves in Serbia

A few things are true here no matter who you work with:

You'll need to support local cards. Visa and Mastercard are the baseline everywhere, but DinaCard matters specifically in Serbia, a meaningful share of local customers carry it, and not every provider supports it by default.

Every sale needs a fiscal receipt, including online ones. This is a legal requirement (eFiskalizacija), not optional, and it's one of the parts people most often forget to plan for until a customer asks where their receipt is.

You'll want this to work with whatever you already built. Whether that's a WooCommerce store, an OpenCart shop, a Tilda site, or something custom, the integration should fit your setup, not force you to rebuild it.

Where Polako fits into this

We're the second kind of company, the integration layer, not a direct bank-level processor. We connect to the payment processors Serbian banks already trust (AltaPay, NestPay) and wrap all of it, cards, DinaCard, and fiscal receipts, into one thing you plug in once.

In practice that means: Visa, Mastercard, and DinaCard support out of the box, a fiscal receipt generated automatically on every transaction (no separate step, no separate vendor to call), and ready-made plugins for OpenCart, WooCommerce, Tilda, and Flexbe, plus a REST API if your setup is custom. Typical time from first contact to your first live payment is 20 business days.

A few honest notes

We don't publish a single flat rate on our homepage, and if you look around, you'll notice most providers in this space don't either, pricing tends to depend on your volume and setup, so we figure it out together rather than guessing with a generic number that won't be accurate for you anyway.

We also don't pretend to be the only option. If you need something we don't do, we'd rather tell you that up front than have you find out three weeks into setup.

In short

• There are two broad kinds of payment companies in Serbia: licensed bank-backed processors, and integration layers that connect to them for you
• Every online sale legally needs a fiscal receipt (eFiskalizacija), plan for it from the start
• DinaCard support matters locally, don't assume every provider includes it by default
• Polako is the integration-layer kind: Visa, Mastercard, DinaCard, automatic fiscal receipts, plugins for the platforms you're probably already using
• Typical setup takes about 20 business days from first contact to live payments

If you want to talk through your specific setup, that's what we're here for, reach out and we'll figure out what actually fits.