What the new sales-records regime changes, and what remains non‑negotiable in consumer protection, pricing and online contracting.
Slovakia is the kind of market that looks simple on a map and complex in the checkout. It sits in the heart of the EU single market, it ships fast across borders, and its consumers buy online as casually as they buy coffee. Regulators follow the same logic: an online shop is still a shop. The screen is only the storefront.
For e‑commerce leaders, Slovakia’s rules don’t live in one statute. They live where trade licensing, consumer protection, price‑promotion rules and fiscal control meet. In 2026 that intersection got sharper. Act No. 384/2025 Coll. on Sales Records expanded real‑time sales recording through eKasa to almost all sellers, while keeping a few narrow carve‑outs that matter a lot for online retail. The practical question is not “Do we have an e‑shop?” but “Where, exactly, do we receive money, and in what form?”
Start with a basic question: who is the retailer? Slovakia expects the seller behind an e‑shop to be clearly identifiable and, where the activity is carried out in Slovakia, properly authorised to do business under the Trade Licensing framework. Cross‑border models can be workable, but they do not remove Slovak consumer‑law duties when you actively target Slovak customers. The safest approach is to map your operating reality in plain language: where fulfilment happens, who invoices, who owns the website, and which entity handles customer claims.
Once the retailer is in place, Slovakia’s e‑commerce and consumer protection rules push you toward one outcome: before the customer clicks “pay,” they must know who they are dealing with, what they are buying, what the total cost is, how delivery and complaints work, and how they can withdraw if they change their mind. The legal mechanics are detailed, but the philosophy is simple. Online commerce removes face‑to‑face trust, so the law tries to rebuild that trust with mandatory transparency.
That transparency starts with the contract flow. Your site should make key terms easy to find and hard to misunderstand. The moment that creates an obligation to pay should be explicit, not hidden behind vague button text. Many compliance failures are not dramatic; they are small frictions that are invisible to product teams and painfully visible to inspectors. A missing business identifier, a vague delivery timeline, or a total price that becomes clear only at the last step because fees appear late in the journey is not just a UX issue in Slovakia. It is a consumer‑law issue.
Returns are the second stress test. Under EU‑style distance‑selling rules implemented in Slovakia, a consumer typically has a 14‑day right to withdraw from a distance contract without giving a reason, with exceptions for certain categories of goods and services. A professional e‑shop treats this not as an annoyance, but as an operational process with three moving parts: the withdrawal notice, the return logistics and the refund timing. The most important internal shift is to stop thinking of “returns” as customer service and start treating them as a regulated timeline: what the consumer must be told up front, what evidence the shop must keep, and when money must move back to the buyer.
The quiet compliance trap in Slovakia, and across the EU, is discount communication. If you announce a price reduction to consumers, EU price‑indication rules require you to show the “prior price,” defined as the lowest price applied during a period not shorter than 30 days before the reduction. That changes promotions from a creative exercise into a data exercise. “Before” must be factual, not theatrical. If you run frequent campaigns, your systems need to store and retrieve the correct prior price for each SKU and each market, and they need to do it consistently across banners, product pages and email.
Now to the 2026 headline: sales recording and receipts. Slovakia’s Sales Records Act defines revenue (tržba) broadly as a payment received for the sale of goods or provision of services at a sales point, in cash or by other payment means that replace cash. The key phrase is “at a sales point,” which the Act defines as the place where the revenue is received. That line matters for e‑commerce. If your model is purely distance‑based, orders placed online, paid by bank transfer or card online, and delivered by a carrier, your checkout may never create a Slovak “sales point.” The moment you add a pickup counter, a showroom, a service desk, or any place where customers pay in person, you are no longer only an e‑shop. You are also a physical point of sale, with physical obligations.
There is one e‑commerce‑friendly exception in the new Act that deserves special attention: the obligation to record revenue in eKasa does not apply to the sale of goods on cash on delivery (tovar na dobierku). The classic Slovak pattern, ship first, collect at delivery, sits inside a carve‑out even as most other exemptions disappear. But this is not a reason to relax; it is a reason to be precise. “Cash on delivery” must be treated as a defined operational flow, not a vague label. If you sometimes collect payment at pickup, take card payments in person, or accept vouchers at a counter, those flows may fall back into the eKasa regime even if most of your orders are paid at the door.
For transactions that are in scope, the operational rule is strict: the seller must record the revenue in the eKasa system without undue delay after receiving it. If recording is temporarily impossible because the system response time threshold is exceeded, the seller must store the data message and later send it to eKasa within 96 hours from the first attempt. Slovakia accepts that networks fail; it does not accept that records disappear. For e‑commerce, this is an integration story. Your POS or order-management layer must not only print or email proof of purchase; it must also reliably handle the “online, offline, resend” reality in the background.
The Act also introduces practical requirements that can surprise hybrid online retailers. Sellers must use eKasa at all sales points and must display a standard customer notice at each sales point. In addition, sellers who must record revenue generally must enable customers to pay cashlessly for amounts above one euro at the sales point, with limited exceptions when internet connectivity or the confirmation tools are unavailable. The message for an e‑shop is straightforward: as soon as you operate any customer-facing payment point, you need to design for visibility (the notice), for auditability (the record) and for choice (cash and cashless).
A final note: fiscalization does not replace accounting discipline. Even where a payment is outside eKasa recording, such as cash on delivery, an e‑shop still needs clean documentation for VAT, refunds, complaints and audits. A customer cannot be told “we don’t have to issue anything.” They can only be told the truth: here is your proof of purchase, here are your rights, and here is how we solve problems when they happen.
So what does “Slovakia compliant” look like in 2026?
It looks like a checkout that tells the truth early, a promotions engine that remembers the last 30 days, a returns process that respects the clock, and a payment architecture that knows when it has created a sales point.
Build those capabilities and Slovakia stops being a regulatory risk and becomes what it should be: a market where operational excellence wins.
The best time to test your Slovak setup is before your next sales campaign. The second‑best time is before the next inspection.
Note: This article is general information, not legal advice. Slovak and EU rules change, and the correct approach depends on your exact payment, fulfilment and customer‑service setup.
Sources and links
Internal reference document: E-commerce_SK_1.0_20260114.pdf, Nikolina Basic, https://www.fiscal-requirements.com/documents/1253
Act No. 384/2025 Coll. (Zákon o evidencii tržieb) – Slovak Collection of Laws (static Slov‑Lex HTML): https://static.slov-lex.sk/static/SK/ZZ/2025/384/20260101.html
Financial Administration of the Slovak Republic (Finančná správa) – eKasa information/FAQ: https://www.financnasprava.sk/sk/aktualne-dan-clo/faq/zakon-o-evidencii-trzieb
Act No. 108/2024 Coll. (Zákon o ochrane spotrebiteľa) – Slov‑Lex: https://www.slov-lex.sk/ezbierky/pravne-predpisy/SK/ZZ/2024/108/20240701
Ministry of Economy of the Slovak Republic – consumer protection legislation overview: https://www.mhsr.sk/obchod/ochrana-spotrebitela/legislativa-v-oblasti-ochrany-spotrebitela-1
Act No. 22/2004 Coll. (Zákon o elektronickom obchode) – Slov‑Lex: https://www.slov-lex.sk/ezbierky/pravne-predpisy/SK/ZZ/2004/22/
Ministry of Interior of the Slovak Republic – Trade Licensing (English): https://www.minv.sk/?trade-licensing=
EU price‑indications rules summary (Directive 98/6/EC as amended by Directive (EU) 2019/2161; Article 6a prior price rule) – EUR‑Lex: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/price-indications-on-consumer-products.html
European Commission guidance on Article 6a (price reductions) – EUR‑Lex PDF: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52021XC1229(06)