AliExpress fined €550M in EU's largest DSA penalty

The European Commission has fined Alibaba’s AliExpress €550 million for failing to prevent illegal, unsafe, and counterfeit products from being sold on its platform. The penalty, announced on Monday, is the largest imposed since the Digital Services Act took full effect in 2024.

For investors and rival e-commerce operators, the fine marks a definitive shift in Brussels from rule-writing to aggressive enforcement. Regulators are demonstrating that the sheer size of a platform will not shield it from financial penalties when consumer safety is compromised.

The Commission detailed a pattern of negligence at the core of AliExpress’s operations. The platform relied on a single, flattering metric to judge its content moderation and failed to ensure it had adequate staff to review suspect listings. As a result, counterfeit clothing, unsafe toys, and dangerous cosmetics remained on the site for weeks after being flagged by authorities.

Internal systems actively worsened the problem. Recommender and advertising algorithms continued to push illegal products to shoppers before they were removed. Furthermore, traders easily bypassed the platform's understaffed brand authorisation system and mis-categorised goods to dodge stricter checks, while a penalty policy for bad sellers went entirely unenforced.

EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen framed the enforcement as a matter of market fairness. “The spread of counterfeit clothing, unsafe toys, dangerous cosmetics and other illegal and harmful products is not an unavoidable cost of shopping online,” she said. “Scale is not an excuse.” She noted that allowing such practices hurts honest European companies that comply with the rules.

AliExpress is the third platform penalised under the DSA, following fines for X and Temu, but its penalty is the steepest due to its reach. With 193 million European users last year, it dwarfs Temu's 130 million and Shein's 156 million. Virkkunen noted that one in five Europeans shop monthly on these three sites, adding that Shein remains under its own EU investigation.

The €550 million fine may only be the beginning for AliExpress. The company has until 20 October to submit a compliance plan to Brussels. If the proposed fixes fall short, the Commission can impose periodic penalty payments, with serious breaches carrying a theoretical maximum of 6% of global annual turnover—a ceiling that far exceeds Monday's fine. The Commission noted it applied leniency this time only due to the newness of the legislation.