The European Commission on Monday fined AliExpress €550 million for failing to adequately assess and mitigate risks linked to the sale of illegal, unsafe and counterfeit products on its e-commerce platform.
The decision comes just days after the EU introduced a €3 flat duty on parcels worth less than €150, which had previously entered the bloc duty-free – a move expected to significantly affect the business models of Chinese online retail giants AliExpress, Shein and Temu.
The fine is the latest development in formal proceedings launched in 2024 over a potential breach of the EU’s Digital Services Act. The Commission found that AliExpress failed to establish an effective system to detect and remove illegal products, while underestimating the gap between the number of human moderators available and the scale of their workload.
The platform’s product compliance checks were also found to be vulnerable to abuse, with malicious traders allegedly misclassifying products to exploit less stringent requirements.
According to the Commission’s investigation, large volumes of illegal products – including unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics – continued to circulate on AliExpress despite moderation efforts, in some cases remaining online for weeks after being flagged.
