Brussels Fines AliExpress $625 Million Over Unsafe Products Flooding Its Marketplace
EU regulators say the e-commerce site ignored earlier warnings, let banned toys and cosmetics reappear online for weeks, and even recommended dangerous listings to shoppers.
The European Commission has hit AliExpress with a fine of more than $625 million, the largest penalty issued so far under the Digital Services Act (DSA). The action, announced yesterday, punishes the Chinese e-commerce giant for what the EC describes as a systemic failure to keep illegal, unsafe, and counterfeit products off its platform, despite repeated obligations to fix the problem.
In its press release, the Commission said AliExpress failed to "diligently assess and mitigate risks relating to the sale of illegal, unsafe, or counterfeit products on its e-commerce platform." That's a fairly clinical description of what investigators actually found: a moderation system so thin and so easily gamed that dangerous items kept reappearing online for weeks or months after being flagged.
Seconds to judge a product, then it's back online
According to reporting from The Guardian, some AliExpress content moderators were given just "tens of seconds" to determine whether a flagged item met EU safety standards. Unsurprisingly, that pace didn't hold up. The EC said it found millions of products that resurfaced online after being pulled, some staying live for more than a month before being caught again.
Part of the problem was structural. The Commission found AliExpress hadn't staffed dedicated teams focused on removing counterfeit and dangerous goods, leaving the platform without the manpower to keep up with the volume of listings moving through it.
Easy workarounds for bad actors
Investigators also concluded that sellers didn't need much sophistication to slip past AliExpress's automated checks. Miscategorizing a product was often enough to dodge the stricter review that certain product types are supposed to trigger, letting unsafe goods post with minimal scrutiny.
The platform's brand authorization system, meant to verify that sellers have the right to list branded goods, fared no better. The EC found it was both understaffed and ineffective. And despite AliExpress's own stated policy of penalizing sellers caught offering illegal products, the Commission said the company simply wasn't enforcing that rule in practice. For sellers willing to cut corners, the odds of facing real consequences were low.
Recommendation systems made it worse
Perhaps the most striking finding involves AliExpress's own algorithms. The EC said the company "inadequately assessed how its recommender and advertising systems exacerbate the spread of illegal products." In other words, instead of the platform's tools helping suppress dangerous listings, they were actively surfacing them to more shoppers, amplifying exposure to items regulators say should never have been sold in the first place.
That matters given how many people are shopping on platforms like this. Speaking to reporters, EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen noted that one in five Europeans shop monthly on sites such as AliExpress, Temu, and Shein. That scale is precisely why the Commission has been leaning on the DSA to force accountability from these marketplaces.
A single metric hid the real damage
The EC also took issue with how AliExpress measured its own performance. The company reportedly relied on one quantitative metric to judge whether its content-moderation systems were working, a measure the Commission says failed to capture the actual scope of harm being done. When EU officials ran their own tests, they found large volumes of illegal products, including unsafe toys and hazardous cosmetics, still circulating on the platform despite AliExpress's moderation claims.
What comes next
The $625 million penalty stands as the largest DSA fine issued to date, underscoring how seriously Brussels is treating platform accountability for physical goods sold online, not just harmful content or misinformation. The case adds AliExpress to the growing list of fast-growing, low-cost marketplaces facing regulatory pressure in Europe, alongside scrutiny already directed at Temu and Shein. For a law designed to force large platforms to police what happens on their own marketplaces, this fine sends a clear signal: claiming to have safety systems in place isn't enough if regulators can prove those systems don't actually work.
