1The challenge
Selling across the Balkans isn’t one market. Every country brings its own requirements:
- Each country uses different card payment providers, often without a standard Magento plugin.
- Local couriers need address data in their own format.
- Shipping methods, cash-on-delivery fees and free-shipping rules differ per country.
- Search engines need to know which site serves which country.
Why local payment providers matter
In many Central and Eastern European markets, customers pay with locally issued cards through local banks and payment gateways that international providers often don’t cover. A webshop that wants to convert in these markets has to offer the providers customers actually use.
2Our approach
Extreme Intimo runs a separate Magento installation per country. We integrate and maintain what each market needs.
Local card payments
Card payment integrations per country, each with its own provider, set up and maintained by us, plus cash-on-delivery fees where customers expect them.
Local courier
Courier integration in Serbia with guided address entry (city first, then street) and parcel locker locations kept current through the courier’s API.
Shipping rules per country
Shipping methods, rates and free-shipping thresholds set up per market, including parcel lockers.
Regional SEO
Hreflang and canonical tags, so search engines show each country its own site.
3The result
Extreme Intimo runs six country webshops with one partner for all of them. New requirements, such as a new payment provider or shipping method in one market, are handled per country without affecting the others.
Also read: how we upgraded all six installations to a current Magento and PHP version.
?Frequently asked questions about multi-country Magento
One Magento installation or one per country?
It depends on how different the markets are. Extreme Intimo runs one installation per country; for Maxifleur and Solo Solis we use store views within one installation. We advise based on payments, stock, pricing and team setup.
Can you integrate local payment providers?
Yes. We install and configure the gateway modules each market uses and deal with the issues that come with them, such as callback timeouts between bank and webshop.
How do you handle hreflang across countries?
Each site gets hreflang tags pointing to its sibling sites, and canonicals that prevent duplicate content.
Can you work in the local languages?
Yes. Our team is based in Niš, Serbia, and works in the languages of the region, which helps across the former Yugoslav markets.
