The European Commission has fined AliExpress €550 million, about $629 million, after finding that the marketplace broke the European Union’s Digital Services Act by failing to curb illegal product sales on its platform.
The decision matters for anyone buying from big online marketplaces in Europe because it is the largest penalty the Commission has imposed so far under the DSA, the bloc’s rulebook for platform accountability. The case targets the boring but consequential part of e-commerce enforcement: whether a platform has enough process and staff to spot bad listings and remove them before shoppers end up with unsafe toys, dangerous cosmetics or counterfeits.
According to the European Commission, AliExpress did not put effective measures in place to limit the spread of illegal goods. The Commission said the company had “allocated insufficient staff” to check products and failed to take down some unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics for “multiple weeks” after they had been detected.
Henna Virkkunen, the EU’s technology chief, said in the Commission’s announcement that the presence of counterfeit clothing, unsafe toys, dangerous cosmetics and other illegal or harmful products online was not an unavoidable side effect of internet shopping. She called it a compliance failure by AliExpress under the DSA.
“Scale is not an excuse; risks must be identified and addressed systematically to ensure consumers can safely shop online,” Virkkunen said.
What the Commission says AliExpress got wrong
The Commission’s finding is not that a single bad seller slipped through the filters. It says AliExpress failed at the platform level: staffing, verification and removal systems were not effective enough to reduce illegal product distribution on the marketplace.
That distinction is the point of the DSA. The law puts obligations on large online platforms to assess and reduce risks created by their services. In this case, the Commission says AliExpress did not meet those obligations when illegal, unsafe or counterfeit products appeared on the site and stayed there.
AliExpress has until October 20, 2026, to fix the breach identified by the Commission. If it does not, the company could face additional periodic fines, according to the Commission.
The biggest DSA penalty so far
The AliExpress fine is more than double the penalty imposed on Temu in May for similar alleged DSA violations. Temu, another Chinese e-commerce rival, was fined more than $230 million in that case.
The size of the AliExpress penalty is the clearest signal yet that the Commission is willing to use the DSA’s financial teeth against online retailers, not just social networks or search platforms. The enforcement theory is blunt: if a marketplace takes the scale, traffic and fees, regulators expect it to fund the unglamorous machinery needed to keep illegal goods from sitting in front of consumers for weeks.
AliExpress now has a deadline and a very expensive compliance problem. The Commission has said what failed. The next test is whether the company changes the machinery behind the marketplace, not just the language in its policy pages.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.
