The European Commission today fined AliExpress 550 million euros for failing to assess and reduce the risk that illegal, unsafe and counterfeit products spread across its marketplace, the second penalty in eight weeks levied against a Chinese e-commerce platform under the Digital Services Act.

The Commission announced the penalty on July 20, 2026, from Brussels, ordering the platform to take corrective action and setting a deadline of 20 October 2026 for AliExpress to submit a plan detailing how it will fix the breaches. According to the Commission, the fine addresses two distinct obligations under the DSA that AliExpress fell short of: the duty to diligently assess systemic risks, and the separate duty to mitigate the risks it identified.

The decision matters to anyone buying, selling or advertising on cross-border marketplaces in the European Union. It sets a concrete monetary figure against risk-assessment failures rather than content-specific violations, and it lands in a stretch of enforcement activity that has now produced fines against three of the largest platforms operating in the bloc.

What the Commission found

The penalty rests on findings that AliExpress mishandled the risk-assessment process at a structural level. According to the Commission, the platform did not properly evaluate whether it had enough staff to review potentially illegal products, and it overestimated how well its own detection systems worked. That combination meant AliExpress failed to reckon with the mismatch between the number of human moderators it employed and the volume of listings those moderators were expected to police.

The Commission's own testing formed part of the evidentiary basis. Testing conducted by the Commission's services showed that many illegal products were recommended or advertised to consumers before they were removed, a finding that ties the platform's recommender and advertising systems directly to the spread of prohibited goods. That detail carries weight for the advertising ecosystem, because it frames algorithmic promotion as an amplifier of risk rather than a neutral distribution layer.

A further shortfall concerned measurement. According to the Commission, AliExpress relied on a single quantitative indicator in its assessment, and that indicator did not properly measure how well the moderation system prevented illegal products from appearing or reappearing in similar forms. Commission testing again supported the conclusion, showing that a high volume of illegal products continued to circulate despite the platform's moderation efforts.

Mitigation failures

Beyond the assessment stage, the Commission identified specific breakdowns in how AliExpress acted on the risks it should have recognised. The detection system did not work properly, and products ranging from counterfeits to unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics remained online for multiple weeks even after being detected. The penalty policy meant to remove traders selling illegal goods was not adequately enforced, and stores flagged for selling illegal products stayed active on the platform despite being penalised.

Product compliance checks could be sidestepped through mis-categorisation. According to the Commission, AliExpress assigned insufficient staff to verify that products were correctly categorised, and its controls failed to catch mis-categorised listings before publication. Traders exploited that gap deliberately, placing products in the wrong category to qualify for more lenient requirements and allowing non-compliant goods to circulate.

The counterfeit problem drew particular attention. AliExpress operated a mandatory brand authorisation system intended to block counterfeit sales, but the Commission found it ineffective and understaffed, which let traders bypass it and publish products that were only removed later. The Commission also spelled out the commercial harm in its findings: sellers of counterfeit goods undercut legitimate businesses that invest in design, safety testing and innovation, forcing those businesses to compete against products that skip those costs entirely.

How the fine was calculated

According to the Commission, the 550 million euro figure reflects the nature of the infringements, their gravity measured by the number of affected EU users, and their duration, which ran at least until June 2025, when the Commission issued its preliminary findings. Failing to conduct proper risk assessments and to mitigate systemic risks counts, in the Commission's words, as a particularly serious infringement of the DSA.

The calculation was not one-directional. The Commission stated that it also weighed mitigating circumstances in AliExpress's favour, including the novelty of the Digital Services Act itself. That acknowledgement, that the regulation is new and its obligations still being interpreted, has appeared as a moderating factor across the Commission's enforcement decisions and helps explain why headline fines have consistently landed well below the statutory ceiling.

Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, framed the decision in terms of platform accountability. "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," she said. "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."

What happens next

The DSA sets out a defined sequence from here. AliExpress has until 20 October 2026 to submit an action plan setting out the measures it will take to remedy its failure to assess and mitigate systemic risks. Once the plan arrives, the European Board for Digital Services has one month to issue an opinion on it. The Commission then has a further month to adopt its final decision and set what it describes as a reasonable period for implementation.

Failure to comply with the non-compliance decision may trigger periodic penalty payments, a mechanism that lets the Commission impose recurring charges until a platform falls into line. According to the Commission, it continues to engage with AliExpress on compliance with both this decision and the DSA more broadly.

The investigation timeline

The case against AliExpress predates today's fine by more than two years. On 14 March 2024, the Commission opened formal proceedings to examine whether the platform had breached the DSA across a wide set of areas: the assessment and mitigation of risks, content moderation and internal complaint handling, the transparency of advertising and recommender systems, the traceability of traders, and data access for researchers.

That investigation split into two tracks. On 18 June 2025, the Commission accepted and made binding a series of commitments that AliExpress offered to address most of the original concerns, including its notice-and-action mechanism and its transparency around advertising and recommender systems. On the same day, the Commission adopted preliminary findings on the two remaining grievances not covered by those commitments, reaching a preliminary conclusion of non-compliance on the assessment and mitigation of systemic risks tied to illegal products. Today's decision converts that preliminary conclusion into a final one.

According to the Commission, the non-compliance decision draws on AliExpress's 2023 and 2024 risk-assessment reports, additional data the platform provided in reply to formal information requests dated 6 November 2023 and 18 January 2024, information from third parties, and the Commission's own investigative work.

Why this matters for the marketing community

For marketers, publishers and platform operators, the AliExpress fine sharpens a pattern that has been building across the Commission's DSA portfolio. The regulation applies to Very Large Online Platforms with more than 45 million monthly users in the European Union, and the enforcement decisions issued so far have targeted the structural design of those platforms rather than individual pieces of content.

The parallel to Temu is direct and recent. The Commission fined Temu 200 million euros in May 2026 over the same core obligation, the failure to assess systemic risks of illegal products, making AliExpress the second Chinese marketplace penalised on that specific ground within a two-month window. Both cases isolate the risk-assessment duty as a standalone obligation separate from the content-moderation infrastructure a platform may otherwise operate.

The broader enforcement record tells advertisers where the monetary thresholds sit. The Commission fined X 120 million euros in December 2025 for transparency violations, including a deceptive verification system and an inadequate advertising repository, in what stood as the first DSA non-compliance decision. More recently, the Commission has signalled a harder line, with reports that Meta faces a fine calculated against 6% of turnover over addictive design in Instagram, a threshold that dwarfs the sums levied to date. Against that backdrop, the 550 million euro AliExpress penalty is the largest DSA fine issued so far, yet it still sits below the statutory maximum of 6% of global annual turnover.

The finding on recommender and advertising systems deserves particular attention from the ad-tech side. By documenting that illegal products were recommended or advertised to consumers before removal, the Commission has drawn a line connecting algorithmic promotion to systemic risk. That framing echoes the transparency obligations at the heart of earlier cases and reinforces a regulatory view in which the systems that surface and monetise inventory carry accountability for what they amplify.

National-level enforcement offers a contrasting picture that puts the Commission's activity in relief. Germany's Digital Services Coordinator converted just 1.3% of complaints into proceedings and issued zero fines in its first full year, a reminder that the significant monetary penalties under the DSA have come almost entirely from the Commission's supervision of the largest platforms rather than from member-state coordinators. The divergence matters for anyone modelling regulatory exposure, because it locates the real financial risk at the EU level and against platforms above the 45-million-user threshold.

AliExpress has also drawn regulatory scrutiny on separate fronts. Privacy campaigners filed GDPR complaints against AliExpress, WeChat and TikTok in July 2025 over data-access failures, part of a wider enforcement strategy targeting Chinese platforms operating in Europe. That the same marketplace now faces both a data-protection challenge and the largest DSA fine to date underlines how multiple European regulatory frameworks intersect over cross-border commerce.

Timeline

  • 6 November 2023: Commission issues first formal request for information to AliExpress
  • 18 January 2024: Commission issues second formal request for information
  • 14 March 2024: Commission opens formal proceedings against AliExpress under the DSA
  • 18 June 2025: Commission accepts binding commitments on most concerns and issues preliminary findings of non-compliance on risk assessment and mitigation
  • June 2025: Duration of the infringements runs at least until this point, per the Commission's calculation
  • 20 July 2026: Commission fines AliExpress 550 million euros and orders corrective action
  • 20 October 2026: Deadline for AliExpress to submit its action plan to the Commission

Summary

Who: The European Commission, acting under Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen, fined AliExpress, the cross-border e-commerce platform operated within Alibaba's international commerce division.

What: A 550 million euro fine for breaching the Digital Services Act by failing to diligently assess and mitigate the systemic risk that illegal, unsafe and counterfeit products spread across the marketplace, accompanied by an order to take corrective action.

When: Announced on 20 July 2026, following proceedings opened on 14 March 2024 and preliminary findings issued on 18 June 2025, with an action-plan deadline of 20 October 2026.

Where: The European Union, where the DSA governs Very Large Online Platforms serving more than 45 million monthly users in the bloc.

Why: According to the Commission, AliExpress understaffed its moderation, relied on a single inadequate metric, let counterfeit and unsafe goods remain online for weeks, and allowed its recommender and advertising systems to promote illegal products to consumers before removal, all failures of core DSA obligations that carry penalties up to 6% of global turnover.