The European Commission has fined AliExpress €550 million, following breaches of its obligations under the Digital Services Act (DSA) to assess and mitigate risks related to the sale of illegal, unsafe or counterfeit products on its platform.
According to the Commission, AliExpress failed to properly evaluate whether it had sufficient staff to review potentially illegal products and overestimated its system in detecting and removing illegal products. Therefore, the Commission considers that AliExpress failed to realistically take into account the disparity between the number of human moderators and their workload. AliExpress also inadequately assessed how its recommender and advertiser systems can worsen the spread of illegal products on its platform. Testing by the Commission revealed that many illegal products were recommended or advertised to consumers before they were removed.
It also only relied on one quantitative indicator to measure how well its moderation system prevented the risk of illegal products appearing or reappearing. This finding was shown again by the Commission’s testing, which showed that a high volume of illegal products continued to circulate despite AliExpress’ moderation attempts.
The Commission has also found that AliExpress failed to take effective measures to reduce risk of dissemination of illegal products. In particular, the Commission identified that AliExpress’ illegal product detection system did not work properly, the company did not properly enforce its own penalty policy for traders selling illegal products, and AliExpress’ product compliance checks could easily be circumvented through the miscategorisation of products. It also failed to adequately prevent the spread of counterfeit products.
Many illegal products, from counterfeit products to unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics remained on the platform for many weeks. AliExpress also allocated insufficient staff to verify whether products are correctly categorised, and the controls that were in place failed to detect mis-categorised products before publication. Malicious traders therefore intentionally placed products in the wrong category to benefit from more flexible requirements. This allowed non-compliant products to circulate freely on the platform.
The Commission considers counterfeit products as a significant risk on AliExpress and that sellers of these products undercut legitimate business and force them to compete with products that bypass investments in design, safety, testing and innovation. The platform’s mandatory ‘brand authorisation’ has been found by the Commission to be ineffective and understaffed and therefore traders have been able to easily bypass the system and publish products that were later removed for being counterfeit.
The fine issued takes into account the nature of the infringements and their duration, which lasted until at least June 2025, when the Commission issued its preliminary findings against AliExpress. Under the DSA, AliExpress now has until October 2026 to submit an action plan to the Commission which must set out measures to address the breach of its obligations. The Board for Digital Services will then have one month to issue its opinion. Failure to comply with the non-compliance decisions may result in periodic penalty payments.
