Is It Legal to Import AliExpress Reviews to Shopify?

The short version, before the detail

Most of what you will read on this question comes from forum threads and importer app listings, and almost none of it quotes the law. The rules themselves are short and fairly clear, and they point the same way in the US, the EU and the UK. None of them bans showing a review because it was written on another website. All of them ban showing a review in a way that misleads the shopper reading it.

So the useful question is what a shopper would reasonably believe when they read an imported review on your product page, and whether that belief is true. If they would believe the reviewer bought this product from you, and they did not, that is the problem. If they would believe the review is about the thing in front of them, and it is really about a cheaper cousin from a different factory, that is the problem. If they would believe they are seeing a fair sample, and you hid the one-star reviews, that is the problem.

This guide goes jurisdiction by jurisdiction, then covers the platform rules that apply wherever you are, then gives a decision table. We are a review app, not a law firm. Nothing here is legal advice, and if your store turns over serious money in a regulated category (supplements, children’s products, anything medical), a short conversation with a consumer-law solicitor or attorney is cheap next to the downside.

What does the FTC rule say about imported reviews? (United States)

The FTC’s Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, 16 CFR Part 465, has been in force since 21 October 2024. Because it is a trade regulation rule, breaking it can bring civil penalties, and the FTC’s own figure is up to $53,088 per violation. The FTC confirmed in September 2026 that the 2025 penalty levels still apply this year. In December 2025 it sent warning letters to ten companies about possible violations, which tells you the rule is being read.

The section that matters for imports is 465.2. It makes it unlawful for a business to write, create or sell a review that materially misrepresents that the reviewer exists, that the reviewer used the product that is the subject of the review, or what the reviewer’s experience was. The same misrepresentations are covered when a business buys reviews or spreads testimonials it knew or should have known were misleading.

Here is the detail most articles miss. The FTC originally proposed a separate section, 465.3, aimed squarely at taking a review written for one product and presenting it as a review of a substantially different product. In the final rule the Commission decided not to finalise it, because it could not settle what "substantially different product" should mean on the record it had. That section is now marked reserved.

That does not make review hijacking legal in the US. The FTC can still act under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which bans deceptive practices generally, and it already has. In 2023 it settled with The Bountiful Company, which had merged new supplements into Amazon listings for different, established products so the new ones borrowed their ratings and review counts. The company paid $600,000. It was the FTC’s first review hijacking case, and it was brought before the new rule existed.

1. 01In force: 21 October 2024 (16 CFR Part 465).
2. 02Penalty: up to $53,088 per violation, unchanged for 2026.
3. 03Core test for imports: does the review misrepresent that the reviewer used this product, or what their experience was?
4. 04Reviews of a different product: dropped from the rule text, still reachable as deception under Section 5, as the Bountiful case shows.

What do the EU rules say? (Omnibus Directive and the UCPD)

If you sell to consumers in the EU, the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive applies, as amended by the Omnibus Directive (EU) 2019/2161. Member states have applied the review provisions since 28 May 2022. Three parts are relevant.

First, Article 7(6): where a trader gives access to consumer reviews, information about whether and how it ensures the reviews come from consumers who actually used or purchased the product is treated as material. In practice that means a short, visible statement of how you check reviews. If some of your reviews were imported from AliExpress and were never checked against your own orders, your statement has to be honest about that.

Second, Annex I point 23b bans stating that reviews come from people who used or bought the product without taking reasonable and proportionate steps to check. A "verified buyer" badge on an imported review is the obvious way to fall foul of this.

Third, point 23c bans submitting false reviews and also bans misrepresenting consumer reviews to promote products. The European Commission’s guidance on the directive gives examples of misrepresentation, taken from the directive’s own recitals: publishing only positive reviews and deleting the negative ones, and linking consumer endorsements to different content than the one the consumer intended. An AliExpress review about a different product, shown under yours, is close to the second example. A star filter on an importer is the first. Annex I practices are banned in all circumstances, so there is no weighing of whether a shopper was actually misled.

What does the UK’s DMCC Act say? (in force since 6 April 2025)

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 made fake and misleading reviews a banned practice from 6 April 2025, in Schedule 20, paragraph 13. The Competition and Markets Authority can now enforce consumer law directly and fine a business up to 10% of its global turnover.

Paragraph 13 bans fake reviews (a review that purports to be, but is not, based on a person’s genuine experience), concealed incentivised reviews, and publishing reviews or review information in a misleading way. The Act gives examples of a misleading way, and two of them describe common importer settings almost word for word: failing to publish negative reviews while publishing positive ones, and giving positive reviews greater prominence than negative ones. It also requires anyone publishing reviews to take reasonable and proportionate steps to prevent and remove banned reviews.

The CMA’s guidance (CMA208) is the most specific document anywhere on imports. It names "catalogue abuse", also called review hijacking or review merging, as presenting reviews of a different product as relating to the product a consumer is considering. It says shared reviews are more likely to comply where the consumer’s experience is materially the same across the products, and less likely where there are material differences, giving the example of sizes made to different quality standards. It also describes a trader who shows reviews collected elsewhere as a second-party publisher, who should check the source platform’s own arrangements for tackling fake reviews before relying on them.

The platform rules: Google, AliExpress and Amazon

Consumer law is one layer. The terms of the platforms involved are another, and they apply whatever country you are in.

Google. Google’s review snippet guidelines say, in as many words, "Don’t aggregate reviews or ratings from other websites." They also say not to include fake reviews, meaning reviews that aren’t based on a genuine experience of the product. If your review app writes imported AliExpress reviews into the Product and AggregateRating markup on your page, you are inside the thing Google asks you not to do, and the risk is your star snippets, which Google can withdraw with a manual action. Google’s separate self-serving rule, about a business marking up reviews of itself, applies to LocalBusiness and Organization pages rather than product reviews, so it is not the rule that bites here. The aggregation rule is.

AliExpress. Clause 3.2(a) of the AliExpress Terms of Use, in the version effective 26 September 2026, prohibits systematic retrieval of site content to compile a collection or database, whether by robots, spiders, automatic devices or manual processes, without written permission from AliExpress. That is a contract term rather than consumer law, and importer apps exist and are listed on the Shopify App Store, but the terms are not silent on it.

Amazon. Amazon’s Conditions of Use (last updated 14 August 2026) grant a licence for personal, non-commercial use only, excluding data mining, robots and similar extraction tools, and say no part of the service or its contents may be reproduced or copied for any commercial purpose without Amazon’s express written consent. The reviewer grants their licence to Amazon, not to you. So reviews of your own product on Amazon, written by your own customers there, still belong to that arrangement. Being the seller does not give you a right to copy them onto your Shopify store.

The decision table: what is fine, what is risky, what is not

Read each line as a description of what the shopper sees and believes. Where a line says fine, it assumes the other lines are also respected. A clean source label does not rescue a review of the wrong product, and the right product does not rescue a four-and-five-star filter.

1. 01Fine: reviews of the exact product you ship (same factory, same materials, same sizing), each labelled with where it came from, imported at every rating, never badged as verified.
2. 02Fine: pointing shoppers to the listing elsewhere, or quoting a single review with its source named, rather than copying the whole set.
3. 03Risky: reviews of the same product from a different supplier, where you cannot be sure the item is materially the same. The CMA’s test is whether the experience would be materially the same.
4. 04Risky: marking imported reviews up in your Review or AggregateRating schema. Google asks you not to aggregate reviews from other websites.
5. 05Risky: bulk copying from AliExpress or Amazon at all. Both restrict it in their terms, whatever consumer law says.
6. 06Not fine: imported reviews shown as your own customers or with a verified buyer badge (EU point 23b, FTC 465.2).
7. 07Not fine: importing only four and five star reviews, or pushing the low ones out of sight (UK Sch. 20 para. 13, EU guidance on point 23c).
8. 08Not fine: reviews of a different or cheaper product presented as reviews of yours (UK catalogue abuse, EU point 23c, FTC Section 5 as in Bountiful).
9. 09Not fine: editing the text of an imported review so it says something the reviewer did not (FTC 465.2(a)(3)).

If you do import, how to do it honestly

Some stores, dropshippers especially, will import anyway in the first weeks, and a clean import is far better than a careless one. This is the version that follows the text of the rules above as closely as we can read it.

The label matters most. Put the source on every imported review, in the review itself, where a shopper reads it without clicking: something like "Imported from AliExpress, where the reviewer bought this item". Keep the original date. If the review was machine-translated, say so. Leave the reviewer’s complaints about slow shipping in place; they are true, and removing part of a review changes it.

Then keep imported reviews apart from your own in two places. On the page, your own customers’ reviews should come first and carry the verified mark; imported ones should never carry it. In your structured data, leave imported reviews out of the Review and AggregateRating markup, so the stars Google shows are built only from reviews written on your store.

Finally, plan to retire them. Imported reviews are a stopgap. As your own reviews arrive, the imported set does less and less work, and the day you have enough of your own is the day to remove them.

1. 01Match the product exactly, or do not import.
2. 02Import every rating, with no star filter.
3. 03Label each review with its source, visibly, and keep its date.
4. 04Never mark an imported review as verified.
5. 05Keep imported reviews out of your review schema.
6. 06Publish a short note on how you check reviews (EU Article 7(6)).
7. 07Remove the imported set once your own reviews carry the page.

The faster route: reviews your own customers write

Stores usually import because they have no reviews and a blank product page feels like a closed shop. The honest fix for that is quicker than it sounds. A store with orders already has reviewers; it just has not asked them yet, or asked once, badly, at the wrong moment.

The mechanics are simple. Ask every buyer, a few days after delivery rather than after dispatch, with one plain email that names the product they bought and has one link. Send a second, shorter ask to the people who did not open the first. Ask for a photo on anything visual. Reply to every review, the critical ones first, because the reply is what the next shopper reads. Our guides on getting more product reviews and on the post-purchase review flow set the whole sequence out, with timings.

If you offer anything in return, a discount or a prize draw, it has to go to every reviewer whatever they rate, and it has to be disclosed. That line, and how to disclose properly, is covered in our guide to incentivised reviews and the FTC line, so it is not repeated here.

The first handful of real reviews does a lot of work. Northwestern’s Spiegel Research Center found a product with five reviews was 270% more likely to be bought than one with none, and those five are yours to keep, show in Google and quote.

BeyondReviews is built for that start. The free plan covers up to 100 orders a month with unlimited review requests, photo and video reviews, Google stars and 10 AI-drafted replies a month, with no card taken. Reviews and your replies are written into the product page’s HTML, where Google and AI answer engines can read them, rather than drawn in later by a script. When your own reviews arrive, they are the ones doing the work.

Frequently asked questions