PARIS – France’s consumer watchdog revealed Wednesday that it had hit Shein with fines totaling 22 million euros related to consumer information requirements, environmental disclosures and the presentation of online return rights.
The Chinese-founded, Singapore-based ultra-fast-fashion giant framed the fines as unfair and said it will appeal, even as it faces mounting scrutiny from regulators across Europe.
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“We dispute these findings and consider the fines manifestly disproportionate,” the company said in a statement to WWD. “Throughout this process, there has never been any doubt about the fairness of transactions on our platform, or the quality and safety of the products and services offered. Not one instance of consumer harm has been established.”
The company said the Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control, or DGCCRF, is relying on an outdated interpretation of how modern e-commerce platforms operate.
The largest of the two fines, amounting to 16.7 million euros, hinges on what the DGCCRF said was a lack of information in confirmation emails, which failed to include legally required details such as product pricing, delivery times and seller information.
Shein said that all of this information was available through customers’ online accounts and updated in real time through its app and website.
“The DGCCRF has applied a 16.7 million euro fine on the grounds that information was not reproduced in a confirmation email, based on an excessively rigid and clearly outmoded interpretation of how customers access order information on modern digital platforms,” it said.
The company also framed this fine as “arbitrary” and based on a number of emails sent during a time period.
A second penalty of 5.7 million euros relates to the presentation of the distinction between France’s withdrawal rights and Shein’s own return policy, as well as the temporary absence of environmental information due to what the company described as a technical fault that had already been corrected by the company on its own.
“The scale of these sanctions is difficult to reconcile with the facts,” the statement said. “Taken together, it gives the impression of a penalty in search of a justification.”
Commerce Minister Serge Papin said the sanctions are part of larger concerns about “unfair competition” from platforms that fail to respect the same rules as domestic retailers.
“Shein has been fined 22 million euros in France today,” he said in a statement.
“The fraud squad is penalizing serious breaches by retailers: failure to respect the right of withdrawal, failure to provide mandatory information for consumers, and lack of transparency regarding the environmental impact of products,” he said in a statement.
What the fines are sanctioning “is not individual errors but a model…of unfair competition,” he said. The platforms “skip compliance with our rules and consumer protection while our retailers play by the rules.”
“Since the discovery of child pornography dolls on Shein, we have decided not to let these platforms off the hook and we will continue until they completely change their practices or abandon our market,” Papin added.
Wednesday’s fines are the latest imposed against Shein in the country.
Last July, the company agreed to pay 40 million euros in penalties following an investigation into allegedly misleading promotions and environmental claims.
In September 2025, France’s data-protection watchdog, the CNIL, imposed a record 150-million-euro fine over violations of cookie-consent rules, which is under appeal.
With Wednesday’s fines, French authorities have now imposed more than 210 million euros in penalties against the retailer in roughly a year.
Shein has also faced scrutiny over products sold by third-party merchants on its marketplace. French authorities previously investigated listings that included prohibited items ranging from handguns to so-called child-like sex dolls.
The French government has taken aim at Shein from various vantage points, including an attempt to temporarily suspend Shein’s French operations last year after the platform opened its first physical retail presence in France through a partnership with Paris department store BHV.
A court rejected that request on the grounds that a shutdown would be disproportionate but ordered the company to suspend sales of certain adult products unless stronger age-verification systems were introduced.
French authorities have also implemented a 2-euro-per-product category parcel tax to curb the growth of Shein and other ultra-low-cost Chinese retailers such as AliExpress, Temu and Wish, in a bid to slow the import of goods into the country.
The French pressure comes as the European Union has intensified its efforts to rein in the explosive growth of Chinese-founded online marketplaces.
In March, the EU agreed to impose a 3-euro tax on all parcels under 150 euros entering the bloc, in an attempt to curb the growing dominance of Chinese e-commerce platforms. In 2025, 5.8 billion small packages were delivered across the European Union, 97 percent of them from China, compared to 1.4 billion in 2022.
That fee will go into effect on July 1.
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