AliExpress gets record €550m fine from EU for allowing sale of illegal products - BBC

What the report says

BBC News reports that the European Union has fined AliExpress €550 million (£467 million), a record penalty under the Digital Services Act, after finding that illegal and unsafe items were being offered on the Chinese online marketplace. The European Commission said products including unsafe toys, counterfeit clothing, dangerous cosmetics and other harmful goods had been available through the platform, which is owned by Alibaba and has 193 million users in the EU.

According to the BBC, the Commission’s two-year investigation concluded that AliExpress had not adequately assessed or managed the risk of illegal products being sold through its service. Regulators said its detection systems missed many problematic listings, some flagged items stayed online for weeks, trader penalties were not properly enforced, and product checks could be bypassed. EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen said the presence of counterfeit or dangerous goods online reflected a compliance failure rather than an unavoidable feature of e-commerce.

AliExpress disputed the decision, calling the fine disproportionate and saying it plans to appeal. The company said it invests heavily in risk assessment, product safety and consumer protection, and argued that EU regulators had not given enough weight to improvements it says it has made.

The BBC notes that AliExpress must pay the fine and submit a plan by 20 October setting out how it will address the breaches. The case is significant because it is the largest sanction so far under the EU’s Digital Services Act, a regulatory framework that can impose fines of up to 6% of a company’s revenue. The report adds that other platforms have also faced EU penalties, including Temu and X.