🇧🇬 Hristo Radichev: “The Biggest E-commerce Opportunity in the Balkans Is Already Here”
What happens when AI starts shopping for us — and what does that mean for e-commerce businesses in the Balkans?
For Hristo Radichev, Founder & CEO of Merkana Group and Brand Ambassador of the 9th Regional E-commerce Conference, the next phase of e-commerce will be shaped not only by how businesses attract customers, but by how well their operations, product data and cross-border infrastructure are prepared for a new reality.
From the rise of agentic commerce and AI shopping agents to the untapped potential of treating the Balkans as one connected e-commerce market, Hristo shares a practical perspective on where the industry is heading — and what businesses should start doing today to stay competitive.
In this interview, we talk about why structured product data is becoming the new competitive advantage, how AI can simplify the complexity of cross-border commerce, where Balkan e-commerce businesses have their biggest growth opportunity, and why removing friction should come before chasing more traffic.
1. What is one e-commerce trend that you believe will significantly shape the industry over the next 12 months?
Agentic commerce is the trend I’d point to – which means AI agents doing the shopping itself, not just recommending products.
The shift is already showing up in the numbers: AI-driven orders to US retail sites grew 15x from January 2025 to January 2026, with AI-referred traffic jumping 805% year-over-year on Black Friday 2025, and consumer surveys show growing interest in using AI shopping tools to find better deals in 2026. The mechanics are moving from AI helping people decide to AI deciding and executing. In other words, AI shopping agents increasingly compare offers, choose what to buy, and complete purchases with lighter human involvement. In a recent post the CEO of a well-known fitness brand in CEE pointed out that Google organic is losing the game vs. AI search. He also stated that the conversion rate grom organic search is 0.06% , while AI, despite having still lower traffic, converts at 5%.
The part that actually changes how sellers operate: AI agents parse structured product data to compare options. That means the competitive lever shifts from persuasive product pages toward having clean, structured, machine-readable catalog data (specs, pricing, availability, reviews etc.) that an agent can actually trust. If your store isn’t set up for agents to read your data, they’ll route around you toward competitors – simply because it’s illegible to the agent, not necessarily because the product is worse.
That’s why in Merkana we put a lot of efforts on data structure when preparing any product for cross-border sales. We need it both on administrative level (e.g. customs declaration, VAT rate calculation etc.), and operationally – so we can list the product in as many marketplaces as possible without having issues.
2. What is one thing businesses should stop doing in e-commerce – and one thing they should start doing immediately?
Stop: Treating product pages as persuasion pieces optimized purely for human eyes – and that means usually heavy marketing copy, vague specs, reviews buried in JavaScript widgets a crawler can’t parse. That approach is increasingly invisible to the shopping agents now doing the comparing on a buyer’s behalf. In other words, if an AI agent can’t cleanly extract price, spec, and availability from your listing, it just skips you for a competitor whose data is simply legible.
Start: Structuring and cleaning your product data now – with proper schema markup, consistent specs, machine-readable pricing and inventory, real structured reviews – so agentic shopping tools can actually find, understand, and recommend you. This is the “answer engine optimization” equivalent of SEO, and it’s cheap to fix today versus retrofitting a catalog later once agent-driven traffic is a meaningful share of orders.
For a cross-border operation specifically, this second point matters more than usual – clean structured data is also what lets an agent correctly surface duties, delivery timelines, and currency conversion instead of just defaulting to whichever listing is easiest to parse (often the domestic or Amazon-native one).
3. What is the biggest opportunity for e-commerce businesses in the Balkans right now?
I am quite emotional on this, since I have dedicated the last year on precisely this matter with Merkana. The clearest opportunity right now is capturing demand that’s currently leaking to large international platforms – and this can be done by building the operating infrastructure that lets a seller treat the Balkans as one coherent market instead of many fragmented, hard-to-navigate ones, with their own currencies – denars, leks, dinars, euro, lei, convertible marks etc.
A few things point to this specifically:
The region isn’t one market indeed. However, it can behave like one if the infrastructure is right. Serbia, Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro, and North Macedonia each run distinct tax, legal, and administrative systems and navigating them effectively requires country-specific expertise rather than treating the region as a monolith. That fragmentation is exactly the kind of problem a standardized operating layer (compliance, payments, merchant-of-record) turns into advantage: standardize the operating layer and localize the funnel, and growth compounds instead of restarting per market.
Logistics is already ahead of the reputation. Most Balkan logistics networks (with just a few exceptions) are genuinely world-class as I see them, with strong last-mile delivery, highly automated sorting hubs, and unusually tight cooperation between courier integrators and carriers, in some ways ahead of Western Europe. That’s an underused asset for anyone positioning the region as a fulfillment base, not just a demand market.
Payment localization is still a conversion bottleneck. Debit cards, cash-on-delivery dominating almost all markets, and trust signals like SSL badges and third-party processor credentials still make or break checkout completion regionally. This is a “boring” fix with outsized ROI that most sellers still get wrong.
4. How is AI changing the way you work, and what is one AI tool or use case you believe every e-commerce professional should know about?
For Merkana specifically, AI is showing up less as a customer-facing gimmick and more as an operations force-multiplier. This makes sense given our operating system is built to be asset-light and infrastructure-focused. In fact our partner marketplaces all across the Balkans already have quite good tools to serve the customers, so we focus more on pure operational optimization powered by AI.
The clearest example we are currently working on is our duty fee definer – an AI agent that takes an HS code, origin, and destination and returns the applicable duty rate. That’s a genuinely hard, fiddly, rules-based problem across all Balkan markets plus EU customs (especially now with the new €3-per-article duty replacing the old €150 exemption), and it’s exactly the kind of task that’s tedious and error-prone for a human but tractable for an AI agent working off structured trade data. We have the so called human in the loop, of course, but it is rather for separate cases as sample validation or where there’s a doubt about which tariff code to allocate to this particular product.
More broadly, this reflects a pattern worth naming: AI is most valuable for in compressing regulatory and operational complexity – most precisely in duty calculation, compliance logic, multi-market pricing. This is the back stage – the unglamorous work that’s actually the hard part of cross-border commerce.
One AI use case every e-commerce professional should know about right now is the structured-data optimization for AI shopping agents. It is sometimes called “answer engine optimization” (AEO). As covered earlier, AI agents from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and native retail assistants are increasingly doing the product discovery and comparison that used to be a human scrolling a page. They parse structured data instead of reading marketing copy. For a cross-border operator like Merkana, this is even more important – an agent also needs to correctly surface duties, delivery timelines, and currency conversion, which only works if the underlying data is clean per market, not just per product.
5. If you could give one piece of advice to a business that wants to grow in e-commerce, what would it be?
It’s very simple: focus on removing friction before chasing more traffic.
Many businesses invest heavily in advertising while customers still face unclear product information, unexpected costs, limited payment options, slow delivery, or difficult returns. Sustainable growth comes from making the entire buying experience simple and trustworthy from discovery to delivery. Once that foundation works, every marketing dollar becomes more effective.
6. What are you most looking forward to about the upcoming 9th Regional E-commerce Conference, and what would you say to people who are considering attending?
This year’s confirmed speaker lineup includes experts from Google DeepMind and LinkedIn alongside regional leaders, which is a notably higher-caliber AI presence than a typical regional trade event pulls in. The last year’s edition drew 900+ participants from over 10 countries with speakers from companies like TikTok, Booking.com, and Dolce & Gabbana, so it’s grown from a Macedonia-local event into a genuine cross-border convening point.
For people who are considering to attend, I’d point out the direct access to the people setting regional e-commerce policy and standards. Also, there will be a hall full of merchants who are living the fragmentation problem – sellers navigating Western Balkans’ separate systems firsthand, so is there really a better place to know more professionals who solve this friction day by day?
If you’re operating anywhere in Balkan e-commerce – either as merchant or in logistics, payments, or fintech – this is one of the few events where the region actually convenes as a consolidated market rather than as separate national conversations. The AI programming this year looks substantive rather than decorative, and the crowd size means the hallway conversations are often just as valuable as the stage content.
It’s a one-day, high-density way to see where the regional players and policy conversation are actually heading, so worth the trip even just for the calibration!