The European Union has slapped AliExpress with a €550 million fine, roughly $629 million, for failing to stop the sale of illegal, counterfeit, and unsafe products on its platform.
This represents the global e-commerce company’s biggest regulatory blow yet and the largest penalty issued so far under the EU’s Digital Services Act.
The European Commission announced the sanction on Monday, saying AliExpress did not do enough to assess and reduce the risks of illegal goods on its marketplace. Counterfeit products, unsafe toys, and dangerous cosmetics reportedly stayed available on the platform for weeks before being taken down.
Sellers who had already been penalised for selling illegal items were also allowed to continue operating, which explains how ineffective the enforcement was.
The Commission had a specific list of failures. AliExpress overstated how well its detection systems were working and understaffed the programme designed to prevent counterfeit sales.
Its advertising algorithms also appear to make illegal products more visible, not less. It also relied too heavily on a single metric to measure how well it was moderating content, a bit like only checking your speed at one point on a road while ignoring everything else.
AliExpress pushed back, calling the fine “excessive and disproportionate” and saying it did not reflect the improvements the company had already made. It said it was reviewing the ruling and considering legal options.
Where this fits in a growing pattern of fines against big platforms like AliExpress
This is the third fine issued under the Digital Services Act, and it is significantly larger than the two that came before it. Temu, another Chinese e-commerce platform, was fined €200 million in May 2026 for similar issues; dangerous baby toys and faulty chargers were among the illegal products found on its marketplace. Elon Musk’s X was fined €120 million in December 2025 for separate DSA violations.
The DSA allows the EU to fine platforms up to 6% of their global annual turnover for serious breaches. With 193 million users across Europe last year, more than both Shein and Temu, AliExpress carries a significant footprint, and the Commission clearly wanted the fine to reflect that scale.
EU technology chief Henna Virkkunen did not mince words. “This is very dangerous for consumers, unfair for companies which are complying with all our rules,” she said. The point being that when platforms like AliExpress look the other way while illegal goods flood their marketplace, it harms the people buying those products and it puts legitimate businesses at a competitive disadvantage.
For Nigerian consumers, the story has a local dimension. The Nigeria Data Protection Commission opened an investigation into Temu earlier this year over concerns that personal data belonging to approximately 12.7 million Nigerians may have been mishandled. The global regulatory pressure on these platforms is intensifying, and Nigeria’s regulators are watching the same companies that Europe is now fining.
