China’s fast-fashion giant Shein has been fined around $26 million by French authorities for violating consumer protection and environmental rules. It was found that the company failed to comply with return rights, lacked traceability information on its products and did not disclose whether items contained plastic microfibers. This is the third such fine that Shein has been hit with in France over the past year—in July 2025 it was hit with about $46.5 million for misleading discounts and greenwashing, and in September 2025 it was fined $174 million over inadequate privacy disclosures and cookie usage. It was also fined around $1.2 million in Italy over greenwashing.
Given that Shein’s total annual profit for 2025 was around $2 billion, such fines are perhaps manageable. The bigger issue for the company is the increasing regulatory pressure it is facing, when to a large extent its business model is built upon—as are many similar Chinese e-commerce platforms—very low profit margins, very high volumes and a sometimes tenuous relationship to quality. And Shein is not alone: this comes several days after another Chinese e-commerce giant, Temu, was fined almost ten times that for not preventing the sale of illegal products on its platform.
Chinese e-commerce platforms operating overseas have become ubiquitous with selling low quality, sometimes even faulty products, and in some cases even counterfeit ones. Many platforms have incredibly low ratings across multiple consumer watchdogs. As EU and China trade tensions are increasing, these fast fashion and e-commerce platforms operating outside of Europe’s strict consumer protection and environmental laws are sure to be yet another issue that Brussels must address with its counterparts in Beijing.