The European Commission has slapped Chinese online retail giant AliExpress with a record €550m (£467m) fine for allowing the sale of illegal and dangerous products on its platform — including unsafe toys, counterfeit clothing, and harmful cosmetics.
The penalty, the largest ever imposed under the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), follows a two-year investigation that found AliExpress's detection systems “did not work properly”. Many illegal products were not flagged at all, while those that were identified remained on the site for several weeks. The commission also said the company failed to properly enforce penalties on traders selling illegal goods, and that its compliance checks could be “easily circumvented”.
“EU fines AliExpress record €550m for failing to stop sale of unsafe toys and counterfeit goods.”
Henna Virkkunen, the EU's tech chief, said: “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.”
Staff were given just “tens of seconds” to assess whether a product met EU standards, the commission found. Illegal products were also promoted through AliExpress's recommendation systems.
AliExpress said the fine was “disproportionate” and announced it would appeal. “AliExpress has been and continues to be committed to meeting our obligations to consumers. We invest substantial resources in risk assessment and mitigation, product safety and consumer protection,” the company said.
The EU has ordered AliExpress to pay the penalty and submit a plan by 20 October detailing how it will address the breaches. The fine is far below the maximum possible 6% of global annual revenue — Alibaba, AliExpress's parent, reported a turnover of €122bn last year.
AliExpress has 193 million users in Europe, making it the largest online retail operator in the EU. The fine dwarfs previous DSA penalties: Temu was fined €200m earlier this year for similar failures, and X was fined €120m last year for deceptive use of blue tick badges.
