The European Commission has imposed a €550 million fine on Chinese e-commerce platform AliExpress after concluding that the company failed to adequately control the sale of illegal products on its online marketplace. The penalty follows an investigation launched in March 2024 and represents the largest sanction issued to date under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
According to the Commission, AliExpress did not meet its legal obligation to conduct a diligent assessment of the risks associated with the distribution of illegal, dangerous, and counterfeit products through its platform. The investigation found that weaknesses in the company’s risk management and moderation systems allowed prohibited goods to remain available to consumers for extended periods.
The Commission stated that AliExpress, the retail arm of Alibaba Group, did not allocate sufficient personnel to review potentially illegal products listed on its platform. Officials said that, in some cases, moderators had only between 10 and 20 seconds to assess the risks associated with individual products. The Commission concluded that the company failed to realistically account for the imbalance between the number of human reviewers and the workload they were expected to manage.
Regulators also identified deficiencies in the platform’s recommendation and advertising systems, concluding that both contributed to increasing the visibility and distribution of illegal products. In addition, the Commission found that AliExpress’s methods for evaluating the effectiveness of its moderation system did not adequately measure its ability to prevent unlawful products from reaching consumers.
According to the Commission, these shortcomings resulted in numerous illegal products—including counterfeit goods, unsafe toys, and dangerous cosmetics—remaining available on the platform for several weeks even after they had been identified. The investigation also concluded that AliExpress did not properly enforce its own sanctions policy against merchants found to be selling illegal products.
The €550 million penalty consists of two components. The Commission assigned €110 million to what it described as AliExpress’s inadequate risk assessment procedures, while the remaining €440 million relates to failures to implement sufficient measures to mitigate those risks.
The sanction is the second major fine imposed under the Digital Services Act for failures related to illegal products on online marketplaces. It follows a €200 million penalty issued against Temu in May and exceeds previous enforcement actions, including a €120 million fine imposed on social media platform X.
Despite setting a new record under the Digital Services Act, the financial penalty remains well below the maximum allowed under the legislation. The regulation permits fines of up to 6% of a company’s annual global revenue. According to the figures cited by the Commission, Alibaba Group generated more than €120 billion in revenue in 2025, placing the current penalty at less than one percent of the company’s annual turnover.
The ruling marks the European Commission’s most significant enforcement action to date under the Digital Services Act, reinforcing the bloc’s efforts to hold major digital platforms accountable for preventing the sale and distribution of illegal products within the European Union.
