AliExpress hit with record $625m EU fine over unsafe toys and cosmetics

European Union regulators have fined AliExpress a record $625 million, the largest penalty issued so far under the bloc's Digital Services Act, after finding the online marketplace repeatedly failed to remove listings for unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics from its platform despite formal warnings to do so.

The Digital Services Act, which took full effect across the EU in recent years, imposes strict obligations on large online platforms to police the products and content sold or hosted on their sites, including requirements to promptly remove listings that violate product safety rules once they are flagged. Regulators found that AliExpress had been notified of specific unsafe listings but allowed many of them to remain available to EU consumers for extended periods.

According to the enforcement action, the flagged products included toys that failed EU safety standards, some posing choking or chemical exposure risks to children, and cosmetics containing ingredients banned or restricted under EU consumer protection rules due to links to skin irritation or more serious health concerns. Regulators said the scale and persistence of the violations, rather than any single incident, drove the size of the penalty.

AliExpress, owned by China's Alibaba Group, said in a statement that it was shocked by the size of the fine, signaling it may contest the decision through the EU's legal appeals process, a route other major platforms have pursued after receiving Digital Services Act penalties, though such appeals have had mixed success and can take years to resolve.

The fine is the latest and largest in a growing string of EU enforcement actions against major online marketplaces and platforms under the Digital Services Act, which was designed specifically to give regulators sharper legal tools to compel large tech companies to address illegal or unsafe content and products at scale, rather than relying solely on voluntary compliance.

EU officials have framed the growing enforcement record as evidence the regulation is working as intended, arguing that fines of this magnitude are necessary to change the economic calculus for platforms that might otherwise treat compliance costs and safety failures as a routine cost of doing business given the scale of their EU sales volume.

Consumer safety advocates have welcomed the penalty but argue that fines alone, however large, do not guarantee lasting change in platform behavior unless accompanied by verified, ongoing compliance monitoring, pointing to previous cases where penalized companies made short-term fixes that did not durably address the underlying moderation gaps regulators identified.

The case adds to broader scrutiny of fast-growing, low-cost cross-border e-commerce platforms, which have expanded rapidly across European markets in recent years by offering extremely cheap goods shipped directly from manufacturers, often outside traditional retail supply chains where safety inspections are more established and consistently enforced.

EU officials said the investigation examined AliExpress's product moderation systems broadly rather than a narrow set of listings, and that the company will be required to demonstrate specific, verifiable improvements to its content moderation and product vetting processes as part of resolving the case, beyond simply paying the fine.

The penalty is likely to be closely watched by other large marketplaces operating in the EU, including competitors facing similar scrutiny over counterfeit goods, unsafe products and content moderation failures, as regulators signal a willingness to impose financial penalties large enough to be felt at the corporate level rather than treated as a routine cost of doing business.