EU fines Temu €200M for allowing sale of illegal products (opens in new tab)

But I still think chargers and children's toys are exactly where the line should be drawn

> but they fill a very real need.

That is not a good reason to fudge certifications and sell dangerous goods. I sympathise with your use case, but the solution is not "let’s just import whatever, as long as it’s cheap".

Really hits hard when you have to go to Home Depot to buy 6 spade connectors for $7.99 to use in a project with 3.3V 300mA max, when you can buy about 500 of them from Aliexpress for the same price.

I know your mileage may vary in different areas of Europe but in Italy and Spain you'll find a plethora of random general stores that resell Aliexpress sorts of goods at a very low markup over direct ordering. The stock variety is obviously more limited but those stores are amazing and fit a really key need.

> The ones which are truly local end up in a "call us to know more" button, no pricing info disclosed.

I cannot speak for the specific part of Europe that you are in, but in the professional Photography community, it is common practice to not list prices and instead have a "contact us" option. The reason isn't a, "Look at us, we're so exclusive and fancy!" Rather, if you list a price for various packages, people get scared off or think they are a master negotiator and can essentially get the work done for free. All of the professionals I've spoken to are happy to work with customers to find a package at an affordable price for them, or at least recommend other professionals in whatever price range they have in mind. The issue is that its exceptionally hard to convey that in a sincere, real way because if someone only sees a price of say $10 000 or whatever, they are naturally going to assume that you cannot possibly get anything for $100-$1 000.

In truth though, many are glad to try and accommodate and get people something that they will be happy with. Perhaps it ends up being 1 or 2 photos instead of an album of photos or whatever, or perhaps the photoshoot is a little bit more "low budget" than a standard one, but there is still lots of opportunity to get the client something they will be happy with. People tend to get wrapped up in the bottom line though, and just assume that they can't afford to capture a happy memory because of the cost - that's something that photographers really want to avoid because (aside from scaring off paying customers! :) ) it means less photos existing, or making it feel impossibly hard to ever show an interest in photography, which is very sad for people who live and breath it.

There is some validity to a marketplace selling items from a larger range of retailers, however the quality is so poor for many items that it simply is no good for society in any way.

My reaction to this sentiment is that they fill the same need in Europe as Uber did in the USA. They found a way to operate in a market while avoiding its regulations and are therefor able to offer much lower prices as their competitors who still follow the regulations.

Europe has historically had pretty strict consumer protection laws, and ever since the end of the Cold War these consumer protection laws have been slowly chipped away. When I was a kid for example companies were not allowed to target children in their marketing material. When American media became predominant in the continent, instead of enforcing our own consumer protection laws against American advertisers, regulators just ignored it and allowed it to proliferate, effectively making ads targeting children legal in the continent. Regulators have been showing the exact same inaction towards Chinese retailers breaking our own laws as they did towards American advertisers three decades ago. I foresee that consumer safety laws getting the same fate as the ban on ads targeting children.

There is a part of conservatism and resistance to change. Online commerce has been seen as "suspicious" by some from the beginning to the point that in, for instance, France free delivery of books is banned... of course this just means that amazon.fr charges 1 cent, instead but it is symptomatic of a state of mind.

yes, i'm very in favor of the shift towards direct-to-consumer among chinese retailers, but that might be because i'm not actually all that sympathetic to small business

What part of Europe is that? Is it is in the EU?

Yea, worst is the retail people who clearly hated Temu/Aliexpress etc because they stand no chance at competing with them when they sell the same things but at 10 times the cost (I don’t blame them. Sucks for them) but instead of just saying the truth that they hate the competition they just make up these fake reasons ”oh it’s low quality stuff that will break” when it’s clearly the same stuff from the same factories etc.

> In the part of Europe where I live

I downvote comments like this, since they make the comment useless. No-one can vouch for or argue against the comment when it's some "part" of a continent of over 40 countries.

Like what?

The clothes are all 100% plastic polyester shit with extra chemicals. If you have proof of otherwise, show me.

Yes I make enough to buy good clothes. If I REALLY need cheap clothes H&M basics are always there.

Same with anything else, IT and tech parts I shop in Sweden.

What else?

Like, what is so needed now that you did not need before but you need to buy plastic China crap from Temu now?

With a few exceptions, those labels do not mean that the product has actually been tested or actually complies with the standard. They are a self-certification: CE means “I promise this complies with European norms”, but the entity deciding to print that on a product may not be honest. Small fly-by-night operations on the other side of the planet have little incentive to be honest.

Generally speaking, international direct-to-consumer e-commerce is a problem for trying to enforce these kinds of rules. The whole model of checks at the border works well for massive bulk shipments, which not only are few enough in number that customs have a chance of doing a proper job on them, but there's also a commercial importer taking a large financial risk on the shipment and therefore 1) having an incentive to ensure they import something safe to begin with, 2) they can be practically fined/sued by authorities if they screw up. But when you have myriad tiny operations selling direct to consumers, the consumer is the importer, and there's no local representative for the manufacturer that you can actually sue. It's effectively a quite lawless area. Being able to do direct imports is an important freedom, and this kind of laxity is inevitable, but it's understandable the EU wants to do something about the flood of poor-quality goods that are terrible for fair competition, the environment, and health and safety.

Are you suggesting opening every package to check for a CE? I think fining after the fact is how those laws are enforced.

The fine is the application of the law. Would be like getting arrested and demanding to know why the authorities aren't getting involved.

They add fake labels, this has been happening for a long time

For electronics without wireless functionality, it is allowed to self-certify. Anyone could also print whatever label they want on their products illegally (i.e. without doing the required paperwork to self-certify).

The policemen controlling imports don't have the competency to check for faults, so we get this situation where specialists regularly sample the products, and heavy fines are issued to the importer.

Who says the products don’t have fake CE labels stuck on? A CE label does not - as far as I can tell - have any security features.

It's not enough, I routinely order things with obvious fake labels or sometimes things I know ahead are clearly not CE compliant, and most packages can't be open due to the large amount, until we have robot warehouses, I don't think is solvable.

Laws are as good as they are enforced. With millions of widgets entering every day, most being very low cost, there's very little point in going one by one checking if they comply.

How would it be enforced? It is around 16 000 000 packages per day.

As if Amazon don’t harvest data or have illegal products on its marketplace.

Doesn’t TEMU have CCP ties? Free market is for businesses and individuals and foreign govt entities should not unfairly benefit from a free market.

I’d start with the immense packaging waste and shameless overconsumption tricks that are banned in basically any other industry.

If you're "pro free market, but", you're not pro free market. That's fine, but you might want to reevaluate whether you're actually for it.

Interesting that this is under the DSA, since if they're the "importer" by mailing parcels to the EU it would also be covered by long standing rules on CE marking.

It's good to know that someone's actually checking this stuff. Self-reported compliance like CE always makes me wonder if I'm a mug for trying to comply honestly with the rules when it would be easy not to.

I'd be curious to see a breakdown between the "toxic chemicals" and "suffocation hazards" categories, as my intuition says it's mostly the latter and often bunk. The other day I was watching the TV above the Walmart customer service desk that displays product recalls, and multiple recalled products were a motorized bassinet, but the wireless remote control has a battery compartment that could be opened and then the battery swallowed. To a layman or (I assume) Chinese inventor, that seems overly burdensome as I am certain that same household would have other wireless remotes.

Is temu much worse than amazon here?

Nobody was ever stopping individual member states from prosecuting Temu - they just don't do it because I don't know why, it's too much work? So finally after decades (because this is a decades-long issue with Aliexpress etc) they set up a EU-wide framework and once it starts acting, it's again EU's fault it took so long? They can only do what the member states delegate to them.

But it will eventually get better because in addition to DSA there are other steps; the importers have to declare a responsible person in the EU, the packages will get more expensive etc.

Yes, because it is the start of enforcement. That's how it works, not just a one-and-done slap on the wrist.

If they don't fix it, it'll eventually continue to the "20% of worldwide revenue" kind of fine everyone on HN was so afraid of when the GDPR was introduced. But that's not what it starts with.

It sets precedent, and has already led to a (by Chinese foreign policy standards) fairly vicious response [0][1][2].

This is also part of the EU's larger tariffs against China [3].

[0] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202605/1361926.shtml

[1] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202605/1362200.shtml

[2] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202605/1362161.shtml

[3] - https://www.ft.com/content/e28fe696-ac30-4543-a105-febc82789...

The theory is that this won't be the only fine if Temu doesn't fix this. So yes, a slap on the fingers, but the fines should grow bigger if Temu doesn't address this.

I don't understand how €200M can ever be considered a "penny slap".

A real slap on the wrist of the CEO by a wronged customer would leave a more lasting impression.

Passing the CE certification is annoying, but hardly a significant cost compared to design of the product. Notably, the law forces companies to put their ass on the line if things to wrong, by registering their name to the product they produce.

We also have laws making the store selling the thing that burnt down your house liable for what they sold, which make them think twice about selling a random off-brand fire-starter with unknown manufacturer. This worked great until Temu, Amazon, and Alibaba entered the market claiming to be "marketplaces" connecting "importers to suppliers" while clearly behaving like a store.

The core issue is that, if the producer cannot be sued, the seller cannot be sued, then there is no reason to follow any safety what-so-ever. So fine the distributor until they put some quality control or standards on the producers they give market to, may solve the issue.

The US has this issue as well, though more focus on individuals suing for each case rather than broad-spectrum compliance regulation. The outcome is the same; with nobody to sue, there is no reason to make things safe for human use.

By the same logic, attempts to use policing to ensure lawfulness are a whack-a-mole exercise which will fail.

So what else are you going to do? Paperwork up front for every single product?

Even if it fails maybe you can get some political scores in the process to get elected again.

They sell adapters to turn oil cans into silencers. Each one should be a violation of the National Firearms Act and subject to up to a half million dollar fine https://www.atf.gov/media/25071/download Nota bened; these are not per-se illegal, but you need to sell them through a firearms dealer and pay for an ATF tax stamp and only in states that have not banned them/all NFA items.

Check will prowse. Western brands aren’t that much better.

Yes, this "section 230" treatment of online platforms is at the core of why social media and the internet in general is full of garbage.

If you sell something on your site, or allow users to post something on your site, you should have some liability for the consequences.

Isn't this being held responsible for it?

they are responsible for it, but it's useful in reporting to differentiate between "fulfilled by" and "bought through"

> If the product is sold in your site, you must be responsible of it.

But this is an internet store.

Since this is under the "Next Steps" section, it's pretty clear to me that the €200M fine is a fixed one-time fine that was issued now, but further, repeated fines ("periodic") will be issued if the hazard is not removed.

No, it's a fine, but the fine doesn't absolve you from fixing it too so it stops. You have this delay to submit a plan for how and on what timeline you will fix it. If you don't do it, or take too long, we will keep fining you, increasingly.

An exemple what how in the old microsoft case they ended up puttin a daily fine for non compliance until microsoft balked back and fixed it (after they tried to act tough and pretended to ignore them).

The end goal ultimately is to get it fixed.

It's actually both: they handed one-time fine for past behaviour (about 200 M€, not final, can and most likely will be appealed and paid in like 10 years or so; cf. Apple tax breaks in Ireland); and threatening more fines if they don't play along in the future. One of the kinds of punishment that Commision can slap (subject to court oversight, ofc) is „daily fines”, which is a fine that accumulates with constant daily rate up to the date the company complies, or some pre-set maximum, which usually calculates to several months, and need to be reissued afterwards (which is an opportunity to double the daily amount, and again, can be appealed to a court).

> It also saves 10% GST.

For now.

Your local companies hate the competition, and will be lobbying hard to remove de minimis exemptions on imports.

Are we still not allowed to call out shills here? Is that still a rule?

Temu charges GST (I presume taobao as well)

I've been done by illegal electronics on Amazon too many times. They don't seem to care at all. You can still buy chargers on them that are in an advisory red list on gov UK....

Amazon is also under investigation under DSA, eBay is not big enough (in the EU) to matter under this law.

People will definitely look for alternatives, but that doesn't make regulation pointless

If people want to be healthy and live, they wouldn't smoke, drink, use meth, gamble, etc. What the people might rationally want, is not what drives the market. The infamous invisible hand is just addiction.

As an EU consumer, I appreciate laws and regulations that ban selling cheap junk that might burn my house down or poison my baby.

I take it you don't?

> TEMO will more than likely just pass the cost of this onto EU consumers.

Good. I want to know my AIEONUS phone charger isn't going to burn my house down and I'm more than happy pay a premium for that knowledge.

The US is going to be selling weapons-grade plutonium to startups, so you may get your chance before long.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/climate/plutonium-nuclear...

Maybe for marketplace articles shipped from outside the EU. It's not legal, so Amazon will surely have a close look (for directly sold items), as well as any company shipping from within the EU.

Leaded solder doesn't really pose a health issue to the consumer.

Feels like the EU is always going to find something to fine you over. Think of it as a tax. The purpose is compensating for the lack of notable domestic tech giants.

> Not sure if laws exist, but dark patterns are everywhere.

I bet you never heard of Microsoft or Google.

> Chinese overproduction a critical topic of discussion for EU-China relations

Ah of course, I do want the state regulating what I can and cannot buy when it comes to junk. Only approved goods should be allowed.

Well, enjoy your plastic toys and clothes that are full of known carcinogens I guess.

It's not being outlawed but made more expensive via a 3 euro fee attached to every item purchased.

Just go to Uniqlo.

It’s not simply difficult, it’s an existential threat to their current business model.

Unless I’m missing something obvious, enforcing regulatory compliance from the army of hustlers that is their vendor market would be expensive or impossible.

Why would they need to sell €200 of illegal products to be fined that same amount?

The TEMU shoppers I know are all older and plenty rich and just basically don’t realize/comprehend that there is a cost to shopping low quality toxic garbage beyond what the see on their receipt. I don’t think cost of living crisis is fueling TEMU, its the desire for unbounded consumption + gamification of shopping.