Online retailers across Southeast Europe have spent years building shops, logistics systems and consumer demand without access to one of Google’s most commercially important advertising formats. The expansion of Google Shopping Ads to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Montenegro and North Macedonia will finally allow them to place products, prices and store names directly in front of consumers already searching for something to buy.
The rollout, however, introduces a layer of infrastructure that remains unfamiliar to much of the regional market. Within the European Economic Area, Shopping ads must be placed through a Comparison Shopping Service, making the choice of CSS provider an early commercial decision for retailers in Croatia and Slovenia, as well as any regional company selling to EU consumers. Product-feed ownership, catalogue segmentation, revenue-based tracking and accurate stock data will also determine whether the new channel generates profitable growth or merely more traffic.
Gabriel Baumgarten, co-founder of the Vienna-based white-label CSS Label Up, works with more than 1,000 agencies and merchants using the company’s Google Shopping infrastructure. In this interview, he discusses how prepared regional retailers are for the launch, the capability gaps agencies need to address, the categories most likely to benefit and the effects Shopping ads could have on competition, pricing transparency and purchasing habits across Southeast Europe.
Google Shopping Ads are expanding to several new European markets in 2026, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Montenegro and North Macedonia. What does this rollout mean for the development of e-commerce in the region?
It closes a gap that has shaped online retail here for years. Until now, retailers in these markets could only buy search intent through text ads. Product advertising, the format that shows an image, a price and a shop name before the click, was reserved for other countries. Everything else already existed: the shops, the demand, the logistics. The channel that turns product intent into revenue was missing.
Two things arrive at once, and the second one gets overlooked. Shopping ads come together with free product listings from the same Merchant Center account. Even retailers with small budgets get product visibility without paying for clicks.
There is also a piece of infrastructure attached that most teams in the region have never had to think about. Inside the European Economic Area, a Shopping ad can only be placed through a Comparison Shopping Service, a CSS. That is not an optimisation, it is how the channel is built in Europe. For Croatia and Slovenia, and for every company here that sells into the EU, the first decision is not the shop system or the agency. It is which CSS you run on.
One note on timing. Most of these markets launched in English first. Local languages and full currency support follow later, and Slovenia comes last. The first competitive wave will be won by whoever is set up properly, not by whoever spends the most.
How prepared are online retailers and e-commerce agencies in these markets to use Google Shopping Ads, and where do you currently see the biggest knowledge or capability gaps?
The biggest gap is the CSS layer, and I want to be clear about it, because it is the one that costs money silently. Many teams in the region are preparing campaigns right now on the assumption that Shopping works like Search: open the account, upload products, bid. In the EEA it does not. Someone has to place those ads as a Comparison Shopping Service. If you do not decide, the decision is made for you, and you run on Google’s own CSS with Google’s margin taken out of every bid.
For agencies this is not a technical detail, it is a business decision. An agency can operate its own CSS, under its own brand, and turn it into a service line and a reason for clients to stay. Or it can hand that position to somebody else. Right now, at the start of a market, that choice is cheap. In two years it is a migration project.
The second gap is ownership of product data. In most companies the feed belongs to nobody. Marketing says it is the developers, the developers say it is the shop system. Ask internally who is allowed to change a product title. The answer tells you a lot.
The third gap is campaign control. Broad match keywords in Search usually do not work well, because you give Google all the control. The same applies here. Do not put your whole catalogue into one campaign and hope. Split it by margin, by price range, by stock depth, by what has proven to sell. That is what our Labelizer is for. We built it as a cockpit for Google Shopping, so the merchant keeps control of the structure instead of handing it over.
The fourth gap is measurement. If you report conversions instead of conversion value, automated bidding will optimise for the wrong products from day one.
What should a retailer have in place before launching its first Shopping campaign, particularly when it comes to product feeds, website infrastructure and performance tracking?
Start with the commercial decision, because everything else sits on top of it. Choose the CSS you advertise through before you build. Switching later moves whole accounts, not single products. Decide it once and the rest stays stable.
Then the product data. Correct identifiers and brands. Titles that start with what people actually search for. Prices and stock that stay in sync with the shop. Clean images. If the feed says in stock and the shop says sold out, you pay for clicks you cannot convert.
Check the category rules before you invest any work. In the new markets, over-the-counter and prescription medicines are not allowed at all. Alcohol and some food categories are restricted in several countries.
Then the shop and the tracking. A verified domain. Shipping and return policies that match what the feed says. A checkout that works on mobile. Conversion tracking that sends real revenue values, not conversion counts. If you can get margin data per product into the system, do it. That is what turns Shopping from a traffic channel into a profit channel.
One more thing that is rarely on the checklist. Decide how you want to segment your catalogue before launch. It is cheap to set up in advance and expensive to fix later.
Based on your experience with other emerging Google Shopping markets, what tends to distinguish retailers that establish a strong position early from those that struggle to gain traction?
Setup. Collecting data costs real money with Google, and changing the setup later can wipe out every learning you paid for. Companies that launch fast with a placeholder structure and plan to fix it in three months usually pay twice.
That applies to the CSS choice most of all. A new market gives you a window of cheap traffic. If you enter that window paying a margin you did not have to pay, you buy your entry data at a premium. And you buy it during the only period when it is cheap.
Three other patterns repeat. Companies that do well define success in money before they launch. A target return per margin group, not one blended number for a catalogue where a product with 40 percent margin and a product with 4 percent margin are treated the same.
They are patient in the first six to eight weeks and disciplined after that. The ones that struggle rebuild the account every two weeks and keep resetting the learning phase.
And they treat operations as part of the channel. Shopping is transparent. Your price, your delivery time and your availability sit next to your competitors in the same block. A retailer with reliable stock data and a delivery promise that holds will beat a better optimised account with weaker operations.
Which product categories and types of online retailers are likely to benefit most from Google Shopping Ads in the region, and what makes them particularly well suited to this format?
The format rewards catalogues where products are searchable, identifiable and comparable. Consumer electronics and accessories, home and garden, DIY and tools, auto parts, pet supplies, sports, toys and baby, beauty, appliances, fashion with strong images. Spare parts and technical niches are often the most profitable and the least contested, because the search terms are precise and the intent is clear.
Private label works for a different reason. There is no identical offer to undercut you on price, so the comparison works in your favour.
It fits less well for services, for products that need heavy configuration, and for very low basket values where one click can cost more than the contribution margin. Regulated categories have to be checked market by market.
The category matters less than the type of company. What predicts success is whether product data is maintained systematically and whether the delivery promise is real. A retailer with 3,000 well maintained products will beat one with 30,000 neglected ones.
This is also where local retailers have a real advantage over large cross-border players. Local delivery times, local returns, local payment methods, service in the local language. All of that is visible in Shopping, and consumers act on it.
Google Shopping Ads in Europe operate through Comparison Shopping Services. How does the CSS model work, and why should advertisers pay attention to the provider they choose?
A CSS is not an add-on you consider later. In the European Economic Area, plus the UK and Switzerland, a Shopping ad on Google search results can only be placed by a Comparison Shopping Service. Every European advertiser is already using one. If you never chose, you are using Google’s own by default.
So the question is never whether. It is only which one, and that has a price. The model comes from the European Commission’s antitrust decision of 2017. Google Shopping has to operate as an independently profitable comparison service. It does that by taking a fixed percentage margin out of every merchant bid before the bid enters the auction. The industry generally puts it at around 20 percent. An independent CSS bids without that deduction. The same budget carries more weight in the same auction, against the same competitors.
Where you sell matters. Croatia and Slovenia are inside this framework, and so is every campaign here that targets EU consumers. Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and North Macedonia are outside the EEA, so purely domestic campaigns there run without the CSS layer for now. Anyone with cross-border plans should still set it up correctly from the start.
When choosing a provider, the margin is the least interesting criterion, because every independent CSS offers it. The real questions are these. Do you keep full ownership of your Merchant Center and Google Ads accounts. Is the fee fixed, or a percentage of your spend that grows as you grow. How fast can you leave. And whose brand appears under your ad. Every Shopping ad carries a line naming the CSS that placed it. A shop or an agency either uses that space, or advertises somebody else in front of its own customers.
That is the problem we built Label Up for. We run a white-label CSS, so agencies and larger retailers advertise under their own brand, on their own accounts, with the auction advantage included. More than 1,000 agencies and merchants use our infrastructure today. And it is less work than most people expect. Existing client accounts do not have to be rebuilt, and a switch is a matter of days, not months.
How do you expect Google Shopping Ads to affect competition, pricing transparency and consumer purchasing habits across Southeast Europe in the coming years?
In the short term there is a window of cheap qualified traffic, because the ad inventory arrives before the advertisers do. I expect that window to last twelve to eighteen months, and I expect click prices to roughly double by the end of it. Then the auction imports competition, including cross-border retailers who already run Shopping in twenty other countries, on their own CSS, and can switch these markets on within a day. That asymmetry is worth taking seriously. The competitors arriving are not only bigger, they pay structurally less per click.
Pricing becomes far more transparent. Price is the first thing a consumer sees, which puts pressure on margins for standard branded goods. The answer is not to win every price comparison. It is to compete where price is not the only variable: delivery speed, availability, bundles, service, own brands.
Consumer habits shift from social feeds and marketplaces towards product search. For retailers here that is the most important part, because this is an acquisition channel that is not a marketplace commission. You keep the customer relationship and you keep the data.
Longer term, structured product data is becoming the interface between a retailer and every automated shopping surface, including AI driven ones. In Europe that interface runs through the CSS layer. Companies in this region are building it at exactly the right moment, which is an advantage over markets that built theirs ten years ago and now have to rebuild.
That is also why we made a simple offer for this rollout. Agencies and shops in the new markets can use our CSS and the Labelizer free of charge until their market goes live. Whoever prepares now starts the first campaign with the setup already in place.
