The AliExpress EU fine of €550m (£467m), handed down by the European Commission, is the largest penalty yet imposed under the Digital Services Act (DSA), and the detail behind it is more damaging than the headline figure alone.
The Commission did not simply find that unsafe toys, counterfeit clothing and dangerous cosmetics slipped through the net. It found, according to EU Law Live, that AliExpress never properly evaluated whether it had enough staff to review potentially illegal products in the first place, and systematically overestimated how well its detection systems were actually working relative to the real volume of content its moderators faced.
That is a different kind of failure. Underestimating a problem is forgivable. Building systems designed, at least on paper, to catch illegal goods, then not checking whether they work, that is something else entirely.
What the AliExpress EU Fine Actually Found
The Commission’s investigation, launched in March 2024 according to EU Insider, identified violations across four main areas: consumer risk assessment, content moderation, transparency of advertising and recommendation algorithms, and seller verification.
The two-year inquiry found that AliExpress’s detection systems ‘did not work properly.’ Many illegal products were never flagged at all. Others that were identified remained on the platform for several weeks. The company also failed to enforce penalties on traders selling illegal goods, and its product compliance checks could be ‘easily circumvented.’
Crucially, as the GRC Report notes, the Commission found that AliExpress additionally failed to measure whether illegal products kept circulating after moderation efforts had nominally addressed them. The company was not only missing problems, it was failing to check whether its own fixes were holding.
Inbox.eu reports that these violations continued at least until June 2025.
‘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,’ said EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen. The platform, owned by the Chinese technology conglomerate Alibaba, has 193 million users in Europe, more than fellow Chinese online retailers Shein or Temu.
The Fine Ceiling and What It Tells Us About Alibaba’s Scale
The DSA permits fines of up to 6% of a company’s global annual turnover. The Commission calculated the ceiling using Alibaba’s global turnover of €122bn for the prior year, which would put the theoretical maximum at roughly €7.3bn. The €550m penalty, while a record under the DSA, sits well below that ceiling.
For context, Macrotrends data on Alibaba’s revenues suggests the group’s most recent fiscal year ending March 2026 generated approximately $148.4bn, a different period and currency from the Commission’s figure, so the two are not directly comparable, but the underlying scale of the business makes the fine look modest by any measure.
AliExpress’s response was predictable. ‘We disagree with today’s decision and the disproportionate fine, which does not adequately reflect our established framework and the significant, proactive enhancements we have made,’ the company said. ‘We are carefully reviewing the decision and considering all available options.’
The company now has until 20 October to pay the penalty and present a plan to the Commission detailing what steps it will take to address the breaches.
Binding Commitments Now Attached to the Platform
Beyond the fine, the Commission has made a series of AliExpress commitments legally binding. According to the European Commission’s digital strategy pages, these cover transparency of advertising and recommender systems, trader traceability, and the platform’s verification and detection mechanisms for risks related to hidden links, its affiliate programme, and products that could affect health or minors.
AliExpress must also make its notice and action mechanism available to both registered and non-registered users, with a clearly labelled button dedicated to reporting content. A Monitoring Trustee will provide regular compliance reports, an external check that the Commission clearly felt was necessary given how thoroughly AliExpress’s internal systems had failed.
This is not the first time the Commission has acted under the DSA. Temu was fined €200m earlier this year for similar violations. X was fined €120m last year over its blue tick verification practices. The AliExpress penalty is the largest yet, but the architecture of oversight (fines, binding commitments, external monitoring) is becoming a template. The question is whether €550m is enough to change behaviour in a platform with nearly 200 million European users and a parent company generating revenues well into the hundreds of billions.
The 20 October remediation deadline is the next hard test. If AliExpress’s plan falls short, a second enforcement action becomes considerably more plausible.
