Published: September 21, 2026
WooCommerce pluginBoth reference days, by category ruleCosmetics and food on 2 May 2025, the rest on 10 September 2026, with ERP import. A one-off 20 € + VAT.Open →What an anchor price is and when it starts
An anchor price is what an item cost on one prescribed day, shown next to today's price. The buyer sees two points instead of one.
The obligation comes from two government decisions published in the Croatian official gazette 101/2026, applying from 1 October 2026 to all retail and services sold to consumers, online retail included.
Fines run from 3,000 to 30,000 euro for a company, 1,000 to 4,000 for the responsible person.
Two reference days, not one
This is the part most often missed. The decision sets two reference days, depending on what is sold:
- 2 May 2025 for food, drink, cosmetics, cleaning products, toiletries and household goods, the group covered since May 2025.
- 10 September 2026 for everything else, including services.
A store selling both cosmetics and small appliances needs both days at once. That is not an edge case but the normal state of most Croatian stores.
Where to get the 2 May 2025 price
No tool can compute it backwards. The day is long past and no webshop has its own snapshot, so the value must come from an existing record.
In practice that means the ERP or old spreadsheets, both equally valid sources.
What must not be done is writing today's price and calling it the anchor price.
How it differs from the 30-day lowest price
The 30-day lowest price is tied to an advertised discount and computed from a rolling window. An anchor price is tied to neither and does not move.
That is why they appear together rather than one instead of the other. One answers whether this is really a reduction, the other how things stood back then.
Where the value comes from
For every anchor price it matters how it came to be, because that decides how much it is worth if challenged:
- From your own snapshot: the system was running that day and recorded the price. The strongest source.
- From an import: the price was carried over from an ERP or an old price list. Perfectly fine, since an existing record is being moved.
- From variants: an item with several variants takes the lowest among them, and only when every one has a value.
An item with none of those sources has no anchor price and nothing should be printed. A blank does less damage than an invented number.
Items added afterwards
An item that did not exist on the reference day has no anchor price and no honest way to get one. Only today's price is shown, plus the 30-day low once enough history exists.
Frequently asked questions
- Does the anchor price have to be higher than today's?
- No. It is data, not a marketing claim. If an item costs more today than it did then, that shows too, as it should.
- When exactly does it start?
- From 1 October 2026, under decisions published in the official gazette 101/2026.
- Does it cover services?
- Yes, services sold to consumers are covered too.
- Can the reference day be changed later?
- The prescribed days are fixed; what changes is which of the two applies to which product.
- Does it show when the item is not on sale?
- Yes. Unlike the 30-day low, it stands for the whole display period.
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