EU Fines AliExpress 550 Million Euros Over Counterfeit and Dangerous Goods

The European Union has imposed a record fine of 550 million euros on the online platform AliExpress, citing its insufficient efforts to combat illegal and counterfeit products circulating on its site. This penalty, levied under the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), underscores the bloc's commitment to ensuring that activities prohibited offline are also regulated online.

European consumers are increasingly purchasing goods like toys, cosmetics, shoes, and electronics from Chinese online retailers. In the past year alone, AliExpress facilitated the shipment of 5.9 billion packages valued under 150 euros to Europe, a fourfold increase since 2022, averaging 16 million packages daily. The EU Commission's analysis found that many products sold through the platform pose health risks or are outright fakes.

According to the EU Commission, AliExpress has fallen short by employing too few personnel to identify illegal products and by over-relying on automated systems that are ineffective at filtering out counterfeit or dangerous items. The platform has been criticized for recommending products identified as fakes for weeks, particularly in categories such as shoes, bags, clothing, and jewelry.

While AliExpress has implemented stricter controls for toys, the Commission noted that sellers on the platform often circumvent these standards by miscategorizing items, such as listing toys under the 'T-shirts' category. This follows a previous EU action in May, where the platform Temu was fined 200 million euros for lacking systematic mechanisms to identify dangerous products, such as small toy parts that pose a choking hazard or chargers that could overheat or cause electric shocks.