EU fines AliExpress more than $625 million under Digital Services Act

The European Commission has fined AliExpress more than $625 million, the largest penalty so far under the Digital Services Act, after finding that the marketplace failed to control illegal and unsafe goods on its platform. The decision raises the stakes for high-volume e-commerce platforms operating in Europe, where regulators are using the DSA to press marketplaces on product safety, seller enforcement and recommendation systems.

The Commission said AliExpress did not adequately assess or reduce risks tied to illegal, unsafe and counterfeit products sold through its service. The regulator said the violations were “particularly serious” and that the size of the penalty reflected both the nature of the failures and delays in addressing risks that had already been flagged.

AliExpress was ordered in June 2025 to bring its service into compliance with the DSA, according to the Commission. Regulators said the company did not make the required changes. No revenue impact, compliance budget or operational remediation plan was disclosed in the Commission’s announcement.

What Brussels said it found

The Commission’s case centers on marketplace controls that it says were too weak for the scale of AliExpress’s European operations. Officials said AliExpress lacked sufficient staffing for teams responsible for removing dangerous and counterfeit listings. The Guardian reported that some moderators had only tens of seconds to decide whether flagged products complied with EU requirements.

The Commission said millions of products returned to the platform after being identified for removal, and some stayed available for more than a month. It also said sellers could avoid automatic takedowns by placing products in incorrect categories, reducing the level of scrutiny before listings went live.

Regulators also criticized AliExpress’s brand authorization process, saying it was understaffed and ineffective. The Commission said AliExpress did not penalize traders for selling illegal goods in the way its own policies said it would.

The findings went beyond takedown operations. The Commission said AliExpress had not properly evaluated whether its recommendation and advertising systems amplified illegal products. In practice, regulators said, those systems helped expose consumers to goods that should not have been on the site. The Commission cited unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics among the products that continued to circulate despite moderation efforts.

Henna Virkkunen, the EU’s technology chief, said one in five Europeans shop monthly on retail sites such as AliExpress, Temu and Shein. She said large platforms cannot treat illegal or harmful products as an unavoidable feature of online shopping, and that scale does not excuse weak risk controls.

AliExpress plans to appeal

AliExpress told Ars Technica that it was “surprised” by what it called a “disproportionate” fine. The company said it plans to appeal, arguing that the Commission ignored its risk management framework and the changes it says it has made.

AliExpress said its EU business is substantially smaller than its China business and said it invests substantial resources in product safety, consumer protection and risk mitigation. The company did not disclose figures for those investments.

The fine is far above earlier DSA penalties. X was fined nearly $140 million in December after the Commission found, among other issues, that changes to paid verification could mislead users. Temu later received a penalty of more than $225 million after regulators found evidence that EU consumers were likely to encounter illegal products on its marketplace.

For marketplaces, the AliExpress decision signals that Brussels is looking at the whole enforcement stack: staffing, seller discipline, automated classification, ads, recommendations and whether removed products stay removed. That is a broader standard than responding to individual takedown notices, and it gives the Commission a template for future cases against platforms whose revenue depends on large third-party seller networks.

This story draws on original reporting from Ars Technica.