European Union regulators on Thursday fined Temu €200 million ($232 million), saying the online marketplace failed to protect consumers from illegal and unsafe products sold on its platform.
Henna Virkunnen, who spoke for the commission in the case, said investigators’ findings showed the company’s safeguards fell short. She warned that the platform’s written risk analysis left “regulators, users, and the public in the dark about the true scale of potential harm posed by illegal products sold on Temu. Now it is time for Temu to comply with the law.”
The penalty — issued under the Digital Services Act — follows an in-depth probe and a mystery shopping exercise that uncovered toxic or hazardous toys and unsafe electronics on Temu. The commission said many electronic chargers sold through the site failed basic safety tests, and a very high percentage of baby toys posed risks because they contained chemicals above safety limits or had parts that could detach and create a suffocation hazard.
The figures behind the decision sharpen why the sanction matters now: Temu serves 92 million users across the 27-nation EU, and the commission found the company “failed to identify, analyze and assess the systemic risks of illegal goods for sale on the platform.” The fine is the second issued under the three-year-old Digital Services Act; Brussels imposed a $120 million penalty last year on the social media site X.
Virkkunen pushed back against what she described as formal compliance that did not match reality. “Risk assessments are “not box‐ticking exercises,” she said, adding that “Temu’s risk assessment underestimates concrete risks, lacks specificity, is not grounded in solid evidence, and is not comprehensive.” Those omissions, the commission concluded, left consumers exposed to potentially dangerous products.
Temu rejected the ruling. The company said it considered the decision “disproportionate” and said it “and does not reflect the current state of our systems.” Temu added that “Temu engaged constructively with the Commission throughout the process and has since taken further steps to strengthen risk assessment, platform governance, and user protection.” The company’s parent, PDD Holdings Inc., also owns the Chinese e-commerce site Pinduoduo.
The fine is tied to the commission’s first DSA evaluation of Temu in 2024. That evaluation, regulators said, found systemic failures rather than isolated incidents — a critical distinction because the Digital Services Act requires large online platforms to identify and mitigate systemic risks to users, not merely react to individual bad listings.
Regulators gave Temu until the end of August to submit an action plan detailing how it will remedy the problems the commission flagged. If Temu fails to comply, the company could face additional daily, weekly or monthly fines — penalties that can quickly exceed a one-off charge and force rapid operational change.
The case exposes a familiar tension in digital commerce: platforms that scale quickly and attract tens of millions of users can be hamstrung by legacy vetting and risk processes. Temu is popular for low-priced goods shipped from sellers in China, and the commission’s mystery shopping suggested that appeal has come with safety trade-offs for buyers in the EU.
For now, the enforcement action puts the onus squarely back on Temu. The commission has set a calendar and the law gives it tools to escalate if fixes are insufficient. In the words of Virkunnen, the question is no longer theoretical: the company must move beyond paper promises to show concrete, verifiable protections or face growing penalties under the DSA.
