The European Commission has accused the online retailer AliExpress of a “systemic failure” to prevent the sale of illegal and dangerous goods on its platform, as Brussels steps up its case against the Chinese company.
Issuing formal findings of an investigation launched in March last year, EU regulators said on Wednesday that AliExpress was failing to do enough to prevent the sale of counterfeit clothes and dangerous children’s toys, among other items.
The company, which claims 104 million monthly users in the EU, did not devote enough resources to content moderation to take down illegal goods on sale on its platform, regulators said.
An EU official said the company – which is owned by Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce group founded by the Chinese billionaire Jack Ma – had “underestimated the general risk of the sale of illegal products”. The official added: “General measures they have in place to avoid the dissemination of illegal products do not work properly – it shows a systemic failure.”
The European Commission said these were preliminary findings, pending further investigation and responses from AliExpress. If EU officials uphold the verdict, the company can in theory be fined up to 6% of global turnover under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
AliExpress has, however, persuaded EU regulators to close aspects of their investigation, by pledging to take action to tackle “hidden links” that take users to an illegal product via a legitimate one.
The online marketplace promised to develop a system to monitor and detect hidden links to illegal products, such as food supplements and medicines, which have been offered for sale via legitimate items. Such hidden links were also said to have taken children to pornographic material.
AliExpress also promised greater transparency over its advertising systems and availability of its data to researchers, which Brussels said addressed concerns in these areas.
The European Commission described the commitments as “legally binding” and said AliExpress could face fines if it failed to follow through.
The investigation comes under the DSA, which is intended to protect people from online harms such as disinformation, illegal content and dangerous products. The act imposes the strictest requirements on the largest companies with more than 45 million users, including Amazon, Google, Meta and X.
AliExpress said it had “proactively engaged and closely collaborated with the European Commission throughout this process” and would continue to do so.
“The commission has recognised our committed approach to ensure a high level of consumer protection and transparency through the breadth and depth of these voluntary commitments offered and agreed,” it said. “We are confident that a positive and compliant result will be achieved through continuing our mutual dialogue with the commission to address any remaining concerns on the DSA.”
Last year, the UK consumer group Which? found dangerous and illegal children’s toys for sale on several websites including AliExpress. The consumer group bought 23 toys from seven platforms and found problems with more than half the items, including toys from AliExpress that broke into small pieces, or had sharp edges that could puncture a small child’s skin.
The products were removed from sale after Which? alerted the companies. AliExpress said at the time it was working with regulators to prevent non-compliant products from being sold.
The European Consumer Organisation, whose members include Which?, welcomed Brussels’ actions on Wednesday.
“It is now very important that the commission monitors whether the commitments AliExpress has agreed to are respected and if they are not, the commission should take more deterrent action,” the group’s director general, Agustín Reyna, said.
