The European Commission fined AliExpress 550 million euros

AliExpress has failed to comply with its obligations under the DSA to diligently assess the risks associated with illegal, unsafe or counterfeit products distributed through its services.

AliExpress failed to properly assess whether it had sufficient staff to review potentially illegal products. The company overestimated the effectiveness of its system in identifying and removing illegal products and did not realistically take into account the human resources available and their workload.

AliExpress failed to adequately assess how its recommendation and advertising systems increased the risk of illegal products. Tests carried out by the Commission services showed that a large number of illegal products were recommended or advertised to consumers before they were removed from the platform.

AliExpress based its risk assessment on only one quantitative indicator, which did not allow a proper assessment of how effectively its moderation system prevented illegal products from appearing on the platform or reappearing in a similar form. This was confirmed by the Commission services' tests, which showed that despite AliExpress' moderation measures, a large number of illegal products continued to circulate on the platform.

Systemic risks were not sufficiently mitigated

AliExpress did not do enough to reduce the risk of illegal products circulating. The Commission identified the following shortcomings in particular.

The system for detecting illegal products did not function properly. Numerous illegal products, including counterfeit products, dangerous toys and dangerous cosmetics, circulated on the platform and, even after being detected, they often remained on sale for several weeks.

AliExpress did not properly implement its penalty policy for traders selling illegal products. Enforcement of penalties was not sufficiently effective and traders selling illegal products were able to continue operating on AliExpress even after penalties were imposed.

Product compliance checks were easily circumvented by deliberately misclassifying products. The company did not allocate sufficient staff to verify that products were in the correct category, and the controls in place failed to detect misclassified products before they appeared on the platform. Malicious traders deliberately misclassified products in categories subject to less stringent requirements, allowing non-compliant products to circulate freely on the platform.

Counterfeit products were not adequately prevented. Counterfeit products harm consumers’ rights as well as legitimate businesses that invest in design, safety checks, and innovation, while at the same time being forced to compete with products that have not made such investments. AliExpress’ brand authorization system, which was designed to prevent the sale of counterfeit products, proved ineffective and lacked sufficient resources to administer it. As a result, traders were able to easily circumvent the system and list large numbers of products that were only later removed after they were identified as counterfeits.

In determining the amount of the fine imposed today, the Commission took into account the nature of the infringements, their gravity in terms of their impact on users in the European Union, and their duration, which continued at least until June 2025, when the Commission notified AliExpress of its preliminary findings. Failure to carry out proper risk assessments and failure to mitigate systemic risks constitute particularly serious infringements under the Digital Services Regulation. However, the Commission also took into account mitigating circumstances in AliExpress' favour when setting the amount of the fine.

Next steps

AliExpress now has until 20 October 2026 to submit to the Commission a plan of action setting out the measures to remedy the infringement. The European Digital Services Board has one month from receipt of the plan to provide its opinion. The Commission will then have one further month to adopt its final decision and set a reasonable period for its implementation.

Failure to comply with the Commission's decision may result in the imposition of periodic penalty payments. The Commission will continue to work with AliExpress to ensure compliance with the decision and with the Digital Services Regulation more generally.

The Commission opened formal proceedings against AliExpress on 14 March 2024 to assess whether AliExpress may have infringed the Digital Services Regulation (DSA) in areas including risk assessment and mitigation, content moderation and internal complaint handling mechanism, transparency of advertising and recommendation systems, traceability of traders and access to data for researchers.