The European Commission fines AliExpress €550 million for permitting the sale of illegal, unsafe, or counterfeit products

The European Commission has imposed a €550 million fine on AliExpress for violating the Digital Services Act (DSA), more specifically for failing to meet its obligations when it came to monitoring and mitigating the sale of illegal, unsafe, or counterfeit products on its platform. The marketplace has also been ordered to take corrective measures to remedy the situation and comply with the DSA.

The European body is paying particularly close attention to issues related to how platforms monitor the items they offer, as we already saw with the €200 million penalty imposed on Temu in May for failing to meet these same obligations.

“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.

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”, said Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy.

 AliExpress neither assessed nor mitigated the risks properly

The Commission’s investigation found inefficiencies in both AliExpress’s risk assessment process and its risk mitigation efforts.

Deficient assessment

• AliExpress did not properly assess whether it had sufficient staff to review potentially illegal products. The platform overestimated the effectiveness of its system and failed to take into account the imbalance between staffing levels and workload.
• The marketplace did not adequately assess how its recommendation and advertising systems increased the visibility of illegal products by recommending or promoting them.
• AliExpress did not use quantitative metrics in its assessment and relied solely on a single indicator that did not adequately measure the capacity of its moderation system to prevent the risk of illegal products appearing or reappearing on the platform in similar forms. In addition, tests carried out by European Commission services found that a large volume of illegal products was still circulating despite AliExpress’s moderation efforts.

Failure to mitigate identified systemic risks

• AliExpress’s system for detecting illegal products did not function properly and, in many cases, illegal products that were detected remained available on the marketplace for several weeks.
• AliExpress did not properly enforce its sanctions policy against sellers marketing illegal products on the platform, allowing them to continue operating despite being penalized.
• The lack of staff and effective controls over product categorization on AliExpress allowed bad actors to intentionally misclassify their products. By placing them in incorrect categories with more flexible requirements, they were able to bypass compliance checks before publication. As a result, these non-compliant and potentially dangerous items were able to circulate freely across the platform.
• AliExpress did not adequately prevent the spread of counterfeits due to an ineffective and understaffed “brand authorization” system. Merchants easily circumvented this control by listing products that were only removed afterward. This violated consumer rights and harmed legitimate businesses that invest in design, safety, and innovation by forcing them to compete with items that avoid those investments.

“The fine imposed today was calculated taking into account the nature of the infringements, their severity in terms of affected EU users, and their duration, which lasted at least until June 2025, when the Commission issued preliminary findings against AliExpress… However, in calculating the fine, the Commission also took into account mitigating circumstances in AliExpress’s favor, such as the novelty of the Digital Services Act,” the European body explained.

AliExpress must submit an action plan to comply with the DSA

As required by the Digital Services Act, AliExpress must submit an action plan setting out measures to remedy its failure to comply with its obligations regarding the assessment and mitigation of systemic risks. The marketplace has until October 20, 2026, to submit the plan.

After that, the European Board for Digital Services will have one month from receipt of the plan to issue its opinion. The European Commission will then have one additional month to adopt its final decision and set a reasonable deadline for implementation.

“Failure to comply with the non-compliance decision may result in periodic penalty payments. The Commission remains engaged with AliExpress to ensure compliance with the Decision and with the Digital Services Act more broadly,” the Commission said.

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