The European Commission has fined AliExpress €550 million for failing to stop the sale of fake and unsafe goods. It is the largest penalty yet under the EU's Digital Services Act.
Alibaba’s AliExpress has been hit with a €550 million ($629 million) fine from the European Union. Brussels says the Chinese shopping platform failed to keep illegal, unsafe and counterfeit products off its site.
The penalty, announced on Monday, is the biggest yet under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). That law forces very large platforms to find and reduce the risks their services create.
The European Commission set out a long list of failures in its statement . At the core: AliExpress did not properly assess the risk of illegal goods spreading, and did not do enough to stop it.
The platform did not check whether it had enough staff to review suspect listings, the Commission said. It leaned on a single metric to judge its own moderation, which flattered the results. Its own tests told a different story. Counterfeit clothing, unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics stayed online for weeks, even after being flagged.
The recommender and advertising systems made it worse. Commission testing found illegal products were being pushed to shoppers before they were taken down. A penalty policy meant to punish bad sellers went unenforced, so flagged stores kept trading.
Traders gamed the system in simple ways. They mis-categorised products to dodge stricter checks. AliExpress’s “brand authorisation” system, built to block fakes, was understaffed and easily bypassed.
AliExpress is the third platform to be fined under the DSA, and the hardest hit so far. Brussels fined Elon Musk’s X €120 million in December and Chinese rival Temu €200 million in May. Both were for breaking the same rulebook.
The scale explains the size. AliExpress had 193 million users in Europe last year, EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen told reporters, Reuters reported . Shein had 156 million and Temu 130 million. “One in five Europeans say they shop once a month from Shein, Temu and AliExpress,” she said. Shein is under its own EU investigation.
Brussels has grown far more willing to use the DSA against the world’s largest platforms since it took full effect in 2024. The fine could have been larger still. The Commission said it treated the newness of the law as a reason to go easier this time.
Virkkunen framed the case as consumer protection, not red tape. “The spread of counterfeit clothing, unsafe toys, dangerous cosmetics and other illegal and harmful products is not an unavoidable cost of shopping online,” she said. “Scale is not an excuse.”
She added that lax platforms hurt honest ones. Fakes, she said, are “unfair for companies which are complying with all our rules.” Alibaba did not immediately respond to a request for comment, Reuters said.
The fine is not the end of it. AliExpress has until 20 October to hand Brussels a plan to fix the problems. A panel of national regulators then gets a month to weigh in, and the Commission a further month to rule.
If it falls short, the company faces more pain. The Commission could impose periodic penalty payments on top of Monday’s fine. Serious DSA breaches can in theory cost a platform up to 6% of its global annual turnover. For a business the size of Alibaba , that ceiling is a long way above €550 million.
Alina Maria Stan builds connections that people actually feel. As co-founder and COO of Tekpon, she turns product intuition into real moment (show all) Alina Maria Stan builds connections that people actually feel. As co-founder and COO of Tekpon, she turns product intuition into real moments of discovery, shaping how teams find and adopt SaaS every day. Since 2020, she has led Tekpon’s brand voice, media strategy, and growth plays with a clear focus on human outcomes behind every metric. Before Tekpon, Alina followed curiosity across industries and countries. She was CEO of King Casino Bonus and led affiliate and brand strategy at Extremoo Media and Fable Media in Denmark, where she learned how to build partnerships that last. Early on, she sharpened her CRM and pricing instincts at K.H. ApS, always asking why customers choose what they choose. Her approach is rooted in more than a decade of international experience and two master’s degrees, one in Sustainable Consumption from the Technical University of Munich and one in Consumer Affairs Management from Aarhus University.