The European Commission has fined AliExpress with 550 million euros for allowing the sale of illegal, unsafe and counterfeit products on its platform. It is the highest penalty ever imposed under the Digital Services Act (DSA)the rule with which Brussels forces large online platforms to monitor what is sold and published on them.
The investigation, opened in March 2024, concluded that AliExpress’s detection systems “were not working properly”: many illegal products passed through undetected and others remained on sale even weeks after being identified.
Why is it important. It is not the first time that the Commission takes out the checkbook against a Chinese platform. In May he fined Temu 200 million for similar violations, and in December of last year sanctioned X with 120 million for their misleading payment verifications. AliExpress now takes, by far, the hardest hit of the three.
- Technology Commissioner Henna Virkkunen has been blunt: The sale of counterfeit clothing, dangerous toys and toxic cosmetics “is not an inevitable cost of shopping online”, but rather “a failure” of AliExpress itself when it comes to fulfilling its obligations.
- According to its own data, AliExpress has 193 million users in the European Union, ahead of Shein (156 million) and Temu (130 million). One in five Europeans shops at least once a month in one of the three.
Between the lines. The Commission’s report does not describe a specific failure, but rather a poorly dimensioned system from its roots. AliExpress misjudged whether it had enough staff to review suspicious products, underestimated how poorly its own detection system was working, and failed to evaluate how its recommendation and advertising algorithms were helping to spread illegal items.
The “brand authorization” mechanism, designed to curb counterfeits, has been very easy for sellers to circumvent. And when the platform did sanction a merchant, the penalty did not prevent them from continuing to sell the same thing shortly after.
Yes, but. AliExpress assures that the fine is “disproportionate” and that it will appeal. It maintains that it has invested substantial resources in product safety and that the decision ignores the “proactive improvements” introduced after the first notice from the Commission, just over a year ago.
That nuance matters because the sanction comes after AliExpress escaped a fine in 2024 by pledging to strengthen its controls on medicines and other potentially dangerous products. Brussels has now decided that those promises were not enough.
The context. The DSA allows fines of up to 6% of a company’s worldwide turnover. With the 122,000 million euros that Alibaba invoiced last yearthe legal ceiling would be around 7.3 billion. The 550 million applied are far below, something that the Commission itself attributes, in part, to the fact that the standard is still relatively recent.
And now what. AliExpress has until October 20 to present a plan to Brussels to correct the deficiencies detected. The Commission will review this proposal in December and, if it considers it insufficient, it may impose additional periodic sanctions, not just a single fine.
The underlying message for the rest of the Chinese platforms operating in the European Union, with Shein under open investigationis that size no longer serves as a shield. “Scale is not an excuse,” Virkkunen summarized.
Featured image | Xataka
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