Over the past decade, the globalization of economic activities within the European Union and central and eastern European countries set the imperative of continuous improvement of its own competitive advantages as the main precondition of market survival, especially within the retail sector. Strengthening of the economic integration and the removal of administrative and market barriers, provide businesses with opportunities to subsidies their own weaknesses and to develop competitive advantages through various forms of cooperation and sharing of resources in order to achieve better business results, but also survival on the market. The goal of this paper is to explore strategic alliances in retail and the possibilities of capital integration of businesses entities in retail amongst central and eastern European countries with a special emphasis on Croatia. From the research objective there are four hypothesis and they are as follows: H1: The strategic alliances have a positive effect on the success of the members of the alliances in relation to individual subjects, H2: The more successful members of the retail alliance are less likely to capital integration, H3: The evaluation of certain members of the alliance has an effect on the decision on capital integration and H4: The loss of autonomy and management has a stronger impact on the decision of capital integration with regards to the expected realization of profits in the future. The research findings indicate a positive effect on the performance of merged businesses. The more successful members and the ones who are afraid of losing control of decision making and management have a lower tendency to merger while merging is a preference with those companies whose subjective evaluation is lower than the objective evaluation. An important consideration while making this decision is the level of trust amongst partners. The research has led to new understandings about the determinants on capital integration of members of the alliance. The operating cost and coordination are the biggest barriers towards institutional connectivity. The findings suggest that business entities in the analysed countries enter strategic alliances to stimulate their own desire of benefiting from channels of distribution and procurement, cost benefit and risk diversification. The findings do not show any significant deviations in Croatia compared to the other countries.