Brussels: The Temu compliance plan has cleared its first regulatory hurdle. On 26 October 2026 the European Commission accepted the action plan that the online marketplace submitted under the Digital Services Act, five months after Brussels fined the platform 200 million euros for failing to assess the risk of illegal products properly.
The Commission fined Temu on 28 May 2026 because its 2024 risk assessment relied on general online shopping data instead of evidence about its own service. That approach underestimated how likely European shoppers were to meet illegal goods. Independent test purchases had found many chargers that failed basic safety checks and baby toys that carried medium to high risks, including banned chemicals and choking hazards.
The Temu compliance plan covers five areas of work. Temu will carry out a risk assessment tailored to its own service and develop reliable metrics to test whether its safeguards reduce illegal content. It will also examine gaps in content moderation and how they affect recommended products, analyse whether its algorithms amplify illegal listings, and review how professional sellers could exploit platform features to promote them.
The path to approval of the Temu compliance plan was not smooth. Temu submitted the plan in August, and the Digital Services Committee, which brings together national regulators, issued its opinion on 24 September. The committee first called the amendments partially adequate and said they lacked the detail needed to judge whether they fixed the infringement. The Commission then clarified its key requirements, and the revised plan met the bar.
Under the Temu compliance plan, the company now has four months to put the measures in place, and the clock also covers an interim risk assessment for the six months ending 30 November 2026. If an auditor makes recommendations, the company has one month to report how it implemented them. The investigation began in October 2024, and preliminary findings reached the company in July 2025, so the case has already run for two years.
Temu has called the original fine disproportionate and argues that the decision looked at its 2024 assessment, not its current systems. The Commission sees it differently. Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen said in May that risk assessments are not box-ticking exercises but the backbone of the Digital Services Act. The law allows fines of up to 6 percent of a provider’s worldwide annual turnover, plus periodic penalties if a company fails to comply.
The Temu compliance plan matters for consumers well beyond one platform. In July the Commission fined AliExpress 550 million euros, the largest penalty under the Digital Services Act so far, and regulators now treat marketplaces as test cases for product safety online. Shoppers should watch how the Temu compliance plan performs once the interim assessment lands in the spring, because a weak result could bring new proceedings and periodic penalties.
