The European Commission has fined AliExpress €550 million ($630m/£467m) for failing to curb the sale of illegal and counterfeit goods on its platform, marking the largest ever penalty issued under the EU's Digital Services Act. The fine follows a year-long warning to the Alibaba-owned marketplace, after which Brussels concluded the company had still not done enough to fix the problems, including failing to properly assess whether it had sufficient staff to review potentially unlawful listings or to evaluate how its recommendation and advertising systems were amplifying the spread of dodgy products.

The Commission cited four specific failings: a faulty illegal-product detection system, weak enforcement of penalties against offending traders, compliance checks that could be dodged through product mis-categorisation, and inadequate prevention of counterfeit sales. Although the DSA allows fines of up to six percent of global turnover, meaning Brussels could have sought almost $9 billion given Alibaba's $148 billion annual revenue, it kept the penalty lower citing mitigating factors such as the law's novelty. The move follows new EU customs charges targeting cheap imports from AliExpress, Temu and Shein, part of a broader push to pressure such firms into shifting towards bulk shipping via EU warehouses, which regulators believe would be easier to police.