EU hits AliExpress with €550m fine over sale of illegal products

Today’s announcement comes just a couple of months after the European Commission fined Temu over a similar DSA breach.

The European Commission has issued a fine of €550m to online marketplace AliExpress today (20 July) for failing to prevent the sale of illegal, unsafe or counterfeit products on its platform.

According to the Commission, AliExpress failed to meet its obligations under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) in regard to assessing the risk of dissemination of these kinds of products through its services, along with failing to reduce said risk.

Today’s fine comes after a lengthy investigation into the platform that traces back to 2023.

The Commission stated that the e-commerce platform – which is owned by Chinese tech giant Alibaba – did not properly evaluate whether it had sufficient staff to review potentially illegal products, “inadequately” assessed how its recommender and advertising systems exacerbate the spread of illegal products, and lacked quantitative metrics in its assessment.

The EU’s executive body also determined that AliExpress’s system to detect illegal products did not work properly, that the platform failed to adequately enforce its penalty policy for traders selling illegal products, and that product compliance checks could be easily circumvented through mis-categorisation of products on the marketplace.

AliExpress now has until 20 October 2026 to submit to the European Commission an action plan to remedy the DSA breach, after which the European Board for Digital Services will have one month to issue its opinion. The Commission will then have a further month to adopt its final decision and set a reasonable period for implementation.

“The spread of counterfeit clothing, unsafe toys, dangerous cosmetics and other illegal and harmful products is not an unavoidable cost of shopping online – it is a failure by AliExpress to comply with its obligations under the Digital Services Act,” said the Commission’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy Henna Virkkunen today.

“Scale is not an excuse; risks must be identified and addressed systematically to ensure consumers can safely shop online. Today, we are holding AliExpress to this standard and request it to take action.”

In May of this year, the European Commission issued a fine of €200m to Temu for a DSA breach largely similar to that of AliExpress.

The Commission hit Temu with the fine for failing to “diligently identify, analyse and assess the systemic risks of illegal products being offered on its platform and the resulting harm to consumers in the European Union”, according to a statement at the time.

Meanwhile, at the start of July the EU began to apply a temporary €3 customs duty per item on low-value consignments (worth up to €150) imported from outside the EU.

The EU said the measure – which is part of the its Customs Reform – follows “evidence that a significant share of low-value e-commerce imports fail to meet EU safety and compliance standards, posing risks to consumers and undermining fair competition”.

The fee is in place until 1 July 2028, according to the EU.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.