The Commission fines AliExpress €550 million for breaching the Digital Services Act

On 20 July, the European Commission fined AliExpress €550 million for failing to fulfil its obligations under the Digital Services Act (DSA) to diligently assess and mitigate risks associated with the sale of illegal, unsafe or counterfeit products on its e-commerce platform. The Commission has ordered the platform to take action in this regard.

Failure to assess risks diligently

AliExpress failed to fulfil its obligation under the Digital Services Act (DSA) to diligently assess the risk of illegal, unsafe or counterfeit products being disseminated through its services in a number of ways:

• AliExpress failed to adequately assess whether it had sufficient staff to review potentially illegal products. The company overestimated the effectiveness of its system for detecting and removing illegal products. Consequently, AliExpress did not realistically take into account the imbalance between the number of human moderators and their workload.
• AliExpress failed to adequately assess how its recommendation and advertising systems exacerbate the spread of illegal products. Tests carried out by the Commission’s services showed that many illegal products were recommended or advertised to consumers before being effectively removed.
• AliExpress’s assessment lacked quantitative metrics. It relied solely on a quantitative indicator which, however, did not adequately measure the effectiveness of its moderation system in preventing the appearance or reappearance of illegal products in similar formats. This conclusion is supported by evidence gathered by the Commission’s services, which showed that a high volume of illegal products continued to circulate despite AliExpress’s moderation efforts.

Failure to mitigate the identified systemic risks

AliExpress did not take effective measures to reduce the risk of the dissemination of illegal products. The Commission identified, in particular, the following shortcomings:

• AliExpress’s system for detecting illegal products did not function correctly. Many illegal products, ranging from counterfeit goods to unsafe toys and hazardous cosmetics, circulated on the platform and, even when detected, remained online for several weeks.
• AliExpress did not correctly apply its sanctions policy for sellers of illegal products. This policy was not properly implemented, and shops selling illegal productswere able to remain active on AliExpress despite having been sanctioned.
• AliExpress’s product compliance checks could be easily circumvented by miscategorising products. AliExpress did not have sufficient staff to verify the correct categorisation of products, and the checks in place failed to detect miscategorised products before they were published. Consequently, some malicious sellers deliberately placed products in the wrong category to benefit from more lenient requirements, allowing non-compliant products to circulate freely on the platform.  
• AliExpress failed to adequately prevent the spread of counterfeit products. These products pose a significant risk on AliExpress. In addition to the potential implications for consumer rights, sellers of such products harm legitimate businesses that invest in design, safety testing and innovation, forcing them to compete with products that do not require these investments. AliExpress’s mandatory ‘brand authorisation’ system, designed to prevent the sale of counterfeit products, proved ineffective and was understaffed. As a result, sellers easily circumvented this system and listed many products that were subsequently removed for being counterfeit.

The fine imposed on the 20th was calculated taking into account the nature of the infringements, their severity in terms of the number of EU users affected, and their duration, which extended at least until June 2025, the date on which the Commission issued its preliminary findings against AliExpress. Failure to carry out adequate risk assessments or to effectively mitigate systemic risks constitutes a particularly serious infringement of the Digital Services Act.

However, when calculating the fine, the Commission also took into account mitigating circumstances in AliExpress’s favour, such as the fact that the Digital Services Act is a new piece of legislation.

Next steps

As required by the Digital Services Act (DSA), AliExpress has until 20 October 2026 to submit an action plan to the Commission. This plan must set out the measures necessary to remedy its failure to fulfil its obligations to assess and mitigate systemic risks. The European Digital Services Board will have one month from receipt of the plan to issue its opinion. The Commission will then have a further month to adopt its final decision and set a reasonable deadline for its implementation.

Failure to comply with the non-compliance decision may result in periodic fines. The Commission continues to work with AliExpress to ensure compliance with the decision and with the Digital Services Act (DSA) in general.

Background

On 14 March 2024, the Commission launched a formal investigation to assess whether AliExpress may have infringed the Digital Services Act in areas covering risk assessment and mitigation, content moderation and the internal complaints-handling mechanism, advertising transparency and recommendation systems, the traceability of sellers, and access to data for researchers.

On 18 June 2025, the Commission accepted and endorseda series of commitmentsoffered by AliExpress to address most of the concerns that led to the opening of the investigation, such as the notification and action mechanism, the platform’s transparency regarding advertising, and recommendation systems. On the same day, the Commission adopted its preliminary findings, reaching a preliminary conclusion of non-compliance regarding the assessment and mitigation of systemic risks relating to the dissemination of illegal products – two aspects not covered by the commitments.

The non-compliance decision issued on 20 July is based, amongst other things, on AliExpress’s risk assessment reports for 2023 and 2024; additional data provided by the platform, in particular in response to the Commission’s formal requests for information dated6 November 2023and18 January 2024; information shared by third parties; and the Commission’s own investigations.

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“The proliferation of counterfeit clothing, unsafe toys, dangerous cosmetics and other illegal and harmful products is not an inevitable cost of online shopping, but a failure on the part of AliExpress to fulfil its obligations under the Digital Services Act. The scale of the problem does not justify it; the risks must be systematically identified and addressed to ensure that consumers can shop online safely. Today, we demand that AliExpress meet this standard and call on it to take action.” – Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Technological Sovereignty, Security and Democracy

More information: European Commission