European Commission fines AliExpress €550million, emphasising e-commerce platforms' responsibilities to consumers

Last week, the European Commission fined the e-commerce platform AliExpress €550million for a breach of obligations under the Digital Services Act ("DSA").

The Commission's inquiry (which was formally opened in March 2024) concluded that AliExpress has failed to “diligently assess and mitigate risks relating to the sale of illegal, unsafe or counterfeit products”. 

In particular, the Commission held that the platform failed to assess staffing requirements for the review of potentially illegal products, how its advertising systems were contributing to the proliferation of illegal products, and how well its systems prevented the risk of illegal products appearing or being re-listed. Furthermore, it was found that AliExpress' detection systems did not properly identify illegal products and that product compliance checks were easily circumvented by bad actors. The Commission also considers that AliExpress did not properly enforce a penalty policy for bad actors and that, overall, the platform “failed to adequately prevent the spread of counterfeit products”. 

The €550million fine reflects “the nature of the infringements, their gravity in terms of affected users, and their duration, which ran until at least June 2025". It appears that AliExpress intends to appeal the ruling.

This is the latest (and largest) fine issued by the Commission in relation to illegal products and other consumer protection issues online under the DSA. Temu was issued a €200million fine in May 2026 under the DSA for their failure to properly identify, analyse and assess the risk of illegal products being sold on the platform, and the resulting risk of harm to its consumers. The Commission also penalised X for allowing users to pay to purchase blue-tick verification marks which can allow bad actors to deceive other users, thereby exposing the public to scams such as impersonation fraud. 

These fines, of which AliExpress' is the most severe, demonstrate that the EU Commission is firmly placing responsibility on e-commerce and social media platforms to protect brands and consumers online, whether that be from counterfeit/dangerous products or from other types of scams/fraud. 

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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.

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