How to remove counterfeit listings from AliExpress (2026 guide)

AliExpress sits in an awkward gap for brand owners. It carries the same counterfeit volume you fight on Amazon or Walmart, but it isn’t a US marketplace and the DMCA reflexes you built for domestic hosts don’t apply. The result is a lot of rights holders filing the wrong kind of notice into the wrong channel and wondering why nothing moves. This guide covers what AliExpress actually accepts, the filing procedure in order, and where an automated detection program hands off to operator-driven filing.

Why is AliExpress a distinct takedown problem?

Two facts make it different from an Amazon or eBay takedown, and both change your playbook.

• It’s IPP, not DMCA. AliExpress is an Alibaba Group platform with its own IP Protection Platform for rights-holder complaints. There’s no US host to serve a § 512 notice on, and pasting DMCA language into an IPP complaint just gets it bounced. This is the opposite end of the spectrum from the well-worn Amazon Brand Registry path, where the intake is purpose-built and predictable.
• The seller is usually cross-border.Most AliExpress counterfeit sellers ship from outside your jurisdiction, so the legal levers you’d reach for against a domestic infringer are slow or unavailable. Platform enforcement through IPP is the practical lever — which makes the quality of your enrolled rights and your evidence the whole game.
• It clusters with sibling surfaces. The same operators often run parallel listings on Temu and other cross-border marketplaces. Treat an AliExpress hit as a signal to check the neighbours, not an isolated event.

Before you file: what evidence does AliExpress actually accept?

A complaint is only as strong as the two things it pairs: proof of the right, and proof of the infringement. Assemble these before you open the portal.

1. Your registered right.The trademark registration certificate or copyright registration you’re enforcing, in the jurisdiction the IPP account is enrolled under. This is the document that gives you standing.
2. The exact listing URLs.IPP complaints are per-listing. Collect the specific product URLs — not the store homepage — because that’s the unit of enforcement.
3. A clear infringement statement. Say precisely which right is infringed and how: counterfeit product, unauthorized use of your registered logo, or reuse of your copyrighted product photography. The infringement type you pick has to match the evidence.
4. Side-by-side comparison evidence.Your genuine product and packaging against the listing’s images. Where the counterfeiter reused your own photography, an image-similarity match is unusually persuasive because it shows the theft directly.
5. Dated screenshots with visible URLs. Capture the listing as it stands, URL and date visible, so the record survives the seller editing or pulling the page mid-review.

Map each item to the specific fields the IPP complaint form requests — the form is the source of truth for what’s required, and it changes. Confirm the current field set against the portal rather than this list (checked 2026-07-11).

How do you file through the IP Protection Platform, step by step?

The following is the general shape of the IPP process. Treat it as orientation, not gospel — AliExpress owns this workflow and adjusts it, so verify each step live before you rely on it (checked 2026-07-11).

1. Enroll as a rights holder. Create an IPP account and complete the rights-holder verification AliExpress requires. This is a one-time setup that gates everything after it.
2. Register your IP rights in the portal. Upload each trademark or copyright you intend to enforce, with its certificate. Complaints reference these registered rights, so this has to land before you can file against a listing.
3. Wait for right verification.AliExpress reviews the uploaded right before it’s usable. Build this lead time into your program — you can’t file the day a counterfeit wave appears if your rights aren’t already enrolled.
4. Open a complaint and select the right + type. Choose the registered right and the infringement category that matches your evidence. A mismatch here is the most common reason a complaint is rejected.
5. Attach the listing URLs and evidence. Add the per-listing URLs and the comparison evidence you assembled. Keep one complaint tightly scoped to the right and evidence it actually supports.
6. Submit and track status in the portal.Watch each complaint’s state rather than assuming a fixed removal window. If it’s rejected, fix the specific gap AliExpress names and re-file — never re-submit the same package unchanged.

What happens after you file — timelines and appeals?

Here is where honesty matters more than confidence. AliExpress does not publish a guaranteed removal timeline, and we won’t manufacture one. Review time varies with your right type, the completeness of your evidence, and whether the seller contests. Outcomes are AliExpress’s to decide — no tool, ours included, can force a removal.

If a seller files a counter-notice, you’ve crossed from an operational task into a legal one. A complaint you can’t stand behind carries real exposure — the same good-faith discipline that governs a US § 512(f) takedown program is the right mindset here even though the statute differs: file only what your evidence genuinely supports.

When is it really a lookalike or image-cloned problem?

Not every AliExpress hit is a straightforward counterfeit. Two variants change the response:

• Image-cloned listings. The title avoids your brand name entirely, but the photos are your exact product shots. Text search never catches these — image similarity does. We wrote up the mechanism in image-similarity scoring with CLIP, and a strong photo-reuse match is often your cleanest copyright-infringement evidence.
• Off-platform lookalikes.Sometimes the AliExpress listing is a funnel to a lookalike storefront or domain. That’s a different takedown channel — registrar and host abuse, not IPP — so classify it correctly before you spend a complaint on the wrong target.

How Brand Protector fits — detection and evidence, honest on filing

Brand Protector runs a dedicated AliExpress detection scanner as one of its 16 monitored surfaces. It searches AliExpress daily against your brand keywords, captures a screenshot of each suspected listing, and scores it for image theft with CLIP embeddings against your reference catalogue — a cosine-similarity match at or above the confirmed-photo-theft threshold is the highest-confidence counterfeit signal we surface.

For each confirmed detection, the per-platform evidence-pack builder assembles the listing details, seller info, image-similarity score, and screenshots into a brand-styled PDF you can export. Every detection also clears the triple-validation gate — AI confirmation, a human review that can’t be rubber-stamped, and a sworn admin attestation confirming the exact listing identifier — before we ever call it a takedown. If the same seller reappears after removal, reappearance detection re-opens it.

The one thing we do notdo: file into the IPP portal for you. AliExpress removal is operator-driven — you or your counsel submit the evidence pack through IPP under your enrolled rights. We build the case and keep the record; the filing and the sworn judgment stay with you. That’s the same posture across our marketplace takedown workflow: detection and evidence are automated, the decision to file never is.

This is not legal advice.IP enforcement decisions, counter-notices, and cross-border disputes should be reviewed by qualified counsel. External process facts here are hedged deliberately — verify AliExpress’s current IPP requirements against its own portal before you file (checked 2026-07-11).

Frequently asked questions