In addition to buying clothes, furniture, books and everything that we are used to "buying from the armchair", it was our turn to buy local food products. "Small food producers in Serbia", as the shopping platform is called, gathers different small traders from Serbia in one place.
They sell everything on that platform - from dairy products and meat, to fruits and vegetables, to honey and brandy. During the first three years of operation, they gathered over 1700 small producers from all over Serbia.
The founder of the site "Small food producers in Serbia" Veljko Nešić for RTS said that one of the main reasons why they started the platform was the impossibility of people from the city, who have no relatives in the countryside, how to get local food, and "we all like local products and we like something from the countryside".
There are products from different parts of Serbia, such as Vršac, Belgrade, Valjevo and as far as Brus, Aleksandrovac, Crna Trava and Pirot.
"It meant a lot to us as small producers because we didn't want to appear at markets, stands, markets, we wanted a local story from door to door, to get to know the customers," says hazelnut producer Marko Nikolić to RTS.
In addition to raw hazelnuts, which cost 1200 dinars per kilogram, and roasted ones, which cost 1400 dinars per kilogram, Nikolić also produces hazelnut butter, as well as roasted hazelnuts in acacia honey.
Online shopping
The previous year 2023 was a year of rationalization and stagnation in online business, according to the eCommerce Report 2023, for which the research on the Serbian market was conducted by the online comparison shopping platform Idealno! (part of the Heureka Group) and Valicon, a market research agency.
It should be noted that this decline was expected after the corona virus pandemic, when business with online sales skyrocketed.
However, some categories such as electronics (with a share of as much as a third of total revenues, 33,3 percent), fashion (25 percent) and home and garden products (22 percent) are still massively sold online, and the domestic market is a serious development of grocery shopping over the Internet has also been observed.
Online shopping experts claim that when someone tries the online shopping option for the first time, they love it because in most cases, in addition to more comfortable and transparent shopping, this option is also cheaper.