Today’s announcement comes months after the European Commission fined Temu for breaching the same DSA law.
The European Commission has fined online marketplace AliExpress today (20 July) 550 million euros for failing to prevent the sale of illegal, unsafe or counterfeit products on its site.
According to the Commission, AliExpress failed to meet its obligations under the EU Digital Services Act (DSA) in terms of assessing the risks of distributing these types of products through its services, and failing to mitigate said risks.
Today’s fine comes after a lengthy investigation into the platform dating back to 2023.
The commission said the e-commerce platform – owned by Chinese tech giant Alibaba – did not properly assess whether it had enough staff to review potentially legitimate products, “insufficiently” assessed how its recommendations and advertising programs fueled the spread of illegal products, and lacked multiple metrics in its assessment.
The EU’s executive body also decided that AliExpress’s system for detecting illegal products did not work well, that the platform failed to enforce its penalty policy for traders selling illegal products, and that product compliance checks could be easily avoided by misclassifying products in the marketplace.
AliExpress now has until 20 October 2026 to submit to the European Commission an action plan to remedy the DSA violation, after which the European Board for Digital Services will have one month to issue its opinion. The Commission will then have another month to adopt its final decision and set enough time to act.
“The spread of fake clothes, unsafe toys, dangerous cosmetics and other illegal and dangerous products is not an unavoidable cost of online shopping – AliExpress’s failure to comply with its obligations under the Digital Services Act,” said the Commission’s senior vice president for technology, security and democracy Henna Virkkunen today.
“Scale is no excuse; risks must be identified and systematically addressed to ensure consumers can shop safely online. Today, we hold AliExpress to this level and call on them to take action.”
In May of this year, the European Commission fined Temu 200 million euros for DSA violations that are very similar to AliExpress.
The Commission hit Temu with a fine for failure to “actively identify, analyze and assess the systemic risks of illegal products offered in its territory and the resulting harm to consumers in the European Union”, according to a statement at the time.
Meanwhile, in early July the EU started applying a temporary tax of E3 per item on low-value goods (worth up to €150) imported from outside the EU.
The EU said the move – which is part of the Customs Reform – follows “evidence that a large proportion of low-cost e-commerce imports fail to meet EU safety and compliance standards, which puts consumers at risk and undermines fair competition”.
The currency is valid until 1 July 2028, according to the EU.
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