AliExpress fined record €550m by EU for failing to stop sale of illegal and fake goods

AliExpress AliExpress is the largest online retail operator in the EU with 193 million users. Photograph: Sheldon Cooper/SOPA Images/Shutterstock View image in fullscreen AliExpress AliExpress is the largest online retail operator in the EU with 193 million users. Photograph: Sheldon Cooper/SOPA Images/Shutterstock AliExpress fined record €550m by EU for failing to stop sale of illegal and fake goods Chinese retail platform handed penalty over listings for items such as counterfeit products and unsafe toys Business live – latest updates AliExpress, the Chinese online retail platform, has been fined a record €550m (£470m) by the EU over its failure to stop illegal goods including harmful clothing, cosmetics and kitchen gadgets being sold through its site. The European Commission fine is the biggest yet exacted by the bloc under the Digital Services Act (DSA), legislation that came into force in 2024, to protect consumers from illegal goods, deceptive or addictive marketing techniques. Henna Virkkunen, the EC’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, said: “The spread of counterfeit clothing, unsafe toys, dangerous cosmetics and other illegal and harmful products is not an unavoidable cost of shopping online – it is a failure by AliExpress to comply with its obligations under the Digital Services Act. EU fines Temu for failing to stop sale of illegal and dangerous products Read more “Scale is not an excuse; risks must be identified and addressed systematically to ensure consumers can safely shop online. Today, we are holding AliExpress to this standard and request it to take action.” While the fine is much larger than those previously issued under the DSA to Temu (€200m) and X (€120m), it is less than 1% of the company’s overall revenue, so far lower than the maximum fine it could have exacted which would have been 6% of Ali Express’s global revenues of about €122bn. Temu was fined in May for failing to stop the sale of illegal and dangerous products, while X was fined for breaches including what the EU said was a “deceptive” blue tick verification badge given to users and the lack of transparency of the platform’s advertising. Temu is still under investigation on other issues by the EU and may yet face another fine. The commission found that AliExpress, which is owned by the Chinese tech group Alibaba , did not have enough staff to assess the legality of products, sometimes giving them just “tens of seconds” to judge whether a product met EU standards. It also found that many illegal products were being promoted under AliExpress’s recommendation systems and its internal risk assessments failed. “Many illegal products, from counterfeit products to unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics, circulated on the platform and, even if detected, remained online for multiple weeks,” the commission said. The size of the fine reflects “the nature and gravity” of the platform’s failure to implement mitigating measures to stop consumer