EU Fines AliExpress €550 Million: Inside the Largest DSA Penalty for Illegal Products

On July 20, 2026, the European Commission fined AliExpress €550 million (approximately $629 million) for breaching the Digital Services Act (DSA) — the largest DSA penalty to date . The fine stems from systemic failures in risk assessment and product moderation that allowed the widespread sale of illegal, unsafe, and counterfeit goods on the platform.

Systemic failures identified by the Commission

The investigation, which began with formal proceedings opened in March 2024, uncovered three major failures :

• Inadequate risk assessment: AliExpress failed to diligently assess the risk of dissemination of illegal, unsafe, or counterfeit products through its services . The Commission found the platform's risk assessment was not based on specific evidence about its own service, but on general industry-level information .
• Failure to mitigate known risks: The platform did not take effective measures to reduce the risk of illegal products reaching EU consumers, despite the scale of the problem . Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen stated that "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 DSA" .
• No proper assessment of service design risks: Like the earlier Temu finding, the Commission determined that AliExpress did not properly assess how its recommender systems and product promotion programmes could amplify the dissemination of illegal products .

The Commission had already notified AliExpress of its preliminary findings of breach in June 2025 . At that time, the Commission also accepted and made binding a series of commitments from AliExpress on transparency for advertising and recommender systems, but the core risk-assessment failures remained unresolved .

Comparison with previous DSA penalties

The DSA enforcement history shows a clear escalation in both the scale of fines and the nature of violations:

• X (formerly Twitter): Fined €120 million on December 5, 2025 — the first DSA penalty . The violations were entirely different: deceptive design of the blue checkmark, lack of transparency in the advertising repository, and failure to provide public data access for researchers . The fine was broken into three components: €45 million for the verification marks, €35 million for insufficient advertising transparency, and €40 million for restricting data access .
• Temu: Fined €200 million on May 28, 2026 for very similar failures to AliExpress — inadequate risk assessment of illegal products on its platform . The Commission found Temu's 2024 risk assessment underestimated how often EU consumers encounter illegal items, and evidence from mystery shopping showed a high percentage of tested chargers failed basic safety tests and baby toys posed medium-to-high severity safety risks . Temu was given until August 28, 2026 to submit an action plan .

Company	Fine (€)	Date	Core violation
X	€120 million	Dec 2025	Transparency failures (blue checkmark, ad repository, data access)
Temu	€200 million	May 2026	Inadequate risk assessment of illegal/unsafe products
AliExpress	€550 million	Jul 2026	Systemic failures in risk assessment and mitigation of illegal products

The AliExpress fine is 2.75× larger than the Temu fine and 4.58× larger than the X fine. For context, the maximum possible fine under the DSA is 6% of a company's global annual turnover . Temu's estimated 2025 turnover of €53 billion meant its maximum potential fine was roughly €2.8 billion, and the actual €200 million penalty was well below that ceiling .

Required next steps for AliExpress

The Commission has ordered AliExpress to take corrective action and must submit an action plan by October 20, 2026 to address the identified shortcomings . Failure to comply with the non-compliance decision may lead to periodic penalty payments . The Commission continues to engage with AliExpress to ensure compliance with the decision and with the DSA more generally . The specific remedial measures have not been detailed in the public summary, but they must address the identified systemic failures in risk assessment, product moderation, and mitigation of illegal products.

The broader regulatory context

The AliExpress fine comes just days after the EU introduced a €3 flat duty on parcels worth less than €150, which had previously entered the bloc duty-free — a move expected to significantly affect the business models of Chinese online retail giants AliExpress, Shein and Temu . Together, these actions signal a major regulatory crackdown on e-commerce platforms that fail to police illegal and unsafe products sold through their marketplaces.

Note: A separate €2 million penalty against Temu referenced in some search results was a U.S. Federal Trade Commission matter under the INFORM Consumers Act, not a DSA penalty, and is unrelated to the EU fines discussed here .