The marketplace cannot outsource the risk to the seller.

The European Commission fined AliExpress €550 million for breaching the Digital Services Act. It found that the marketplace failed to assess diligently and mitigate risks connected to illegal, unsafe and counterfeit products, including counterfeit clothing, unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics.

The Commission ordered AliExpress to take action and said failure to comply could lead to periodic penalty payments. The decision rejects a convenient marketplace fiction: that every dangerous listing is an isolated act by a seller rather than a pattern the platform is uniquely positioned to detect.

Safety needs a system, not a report button

A large marketplace can connect signals unavailable to an individual buyer: repeated seller identities, shared payment details, recycled images, abnormal complaint rates, laboratory alerts, product-recall data and clusters of listings that reappear after removal. Risk controls should operate before exposure as well as after a customer reports harm.

The useful technical measure is not simply how quickly one listing disappears. It is the re-listing rate across related accounts, the time from an external safety notice to catalogue suppression, and whether buyers who already purchased the product receive a direct warning and refund route.

Trust cannot stop at the checkout

Marketplaces optimise search, recommendations and payment because those systems increase completed sales. Product traceability, recall delivery and seller verification deserve the same engineering attention because they determine whether the transaction remains safe after the parcel arrives.

The Commission’s decision makes scale part of the obligation. A platform does not need perfect foresight, but it must be able to explain the risks it identified, the controls it deployed and the evidence that those controls reduced exposure to illegal products.