Shopify yanked Ye’s store for selling swastika T-shirts, but e-commerce leaders debate if it moved fast enough
On Tuesday, Shopify decided to take down a website from the rapper Ye that sold nothing but a T-shirt with a swastika on it, more than 24 hours after the item first appeared. The e-commerce community has applauded the decision, but many still have questions about why it took Shopify a day and a half to remove the site.
Retail leaders first caught wind of the shirt on Sunday. That day, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West aired a Super Bowl ad in which he sat in what appeared to be a dentist’s chair and directed viewers to visit his apparel website. The spot aired in Los Angeles, Atlanta and Philadelphia. Within an hour of the ad going live, Yeezy.com wiped its inventory except for one item: a $20 swastika T-shirt labeled as “HH-01,” Variety reported. Just days earlier, Ye had posted on X, “I’m a Nazi.”
Shopify pulled Ye’s site on Tuesday morning. In a statement to Modern Retail, a Shopify spokesperson said, “All merchants are responsible for following the rules of our platform. This merchant did not engage in authentic commerce practices and violated our terms so we removed them from Shopify.”
Sarah Ellenbogen, the CEO and co-founder of customer engagement platform Digiphy, saw Ye’s ad air in Los Angeles. She told Modern Retail that the ad caught her attention because it did not contain a QR code. (Ye simply told viewers to visit a URL.) When Ellenbogen first went onto the website, the swastika T-shirt was not there. “As social media posts started circulating, I refreshed the site and saw it had been updated,” she said.
Ellenbogen soon took to LinkedIn to voice her disgust and called for Shopify to deactivate the site. “Yes, Ye pulled a fast one — switching his site from ‘acceptable’ products to hate-filled ones an hour after the ad aired,” she wrote. “But that doesn’t excuse Fox, the agency that sold him airtime, or Shopify.”
Ellenbogen told Modern Retail that it was “unacceptable” for Shopify to wait more than a day to take down Yeezy.com. “The backlash was immediate, yet they failed to act swiftly,” she said. “They should have been on top of it and removed the site immediately instead of profiting off hate speech.”
Ellenbogen was one of dozens of retail leaders urging Shopify to take action, disable Ye’s website and condemn antisemitism. On Sunday and Monday, members of the retail community, both Jewish and not, wrote posts on social media. They often tagged Shopify, its CEO Tobias Lütke and its president Harley Finkelstein. (Finkelstein is Jewish and has publicly spoken about his faith.)
David Oksman, the CMO of Samsonite and the grandson of Holocaust survivors, posted on LinkedIn, “This is not free speech. This is hate speech. And by enabling its sale, Shopify is making a choice—to prioritize commerce over conscience, transactions over ethics.”
Rhian Beutler, the CEO and founder of Govalo, a gift card solution for Shopify, wrote on X, “I’m a Jewish woman whose grandfather escaped the Holocaust with dozens of direct family members murdered by the Nazis. @harleyf – old friend. I know you aren’t okay with this. Please please please fix this.”
In an interview with CNBC on Tuesday morning, Finkelstein said that Ye’s store “did not engage in authentic commerce practices.” The store had an entire day to prove it was engaging in authentic commerce practices, “which did not happen,” he said. “They violated our terms. We removed them from Shopify.”
When asked why Shopify didn’t deactivate the site immediately, Finkelstein told CNBC, “Good process creates good outcomes. We follow a good process here. It was down the moment we realized it was not actually a real commerce practice.”
Shopify’s terms of service say that Shopify may suspend or terminate accounts “for any reason, without notice and at any time (unless otherwise required by law), including if we suspect that you (by conviction, settlement, insurance or escrow investigation, or otherwise) have engaged in fraudulent activity in connection with the use of the Services.” Meanwhile, its acceptable use terms say that merchants “can’t call for, or threaten, violence against specific people or groups.”
Blake Allsmith, the founder of the wardrobe assistant Cladwell.com, posted on LinkedIn that it was “the right call” for Shopify to take down Ye’s website. Speaking to Modern Retail, Allsmith said he understood why Shopify took more than a day to do so. “I’m going to assume good intentions on the Shopify side,” he said. “I think that they probably just had to figure it out, work with their PR department, have a meeting.” For a large corporation, he said, “it’s tough to get anything done in 24 hours.”
Others mentioned this point on LinkedIn. “I’m no Shopify apologist… and I’m also Jewish,” wrote Paul Drecksler, who writes the e-commerce newsletter Shopifreaks. “I think that Shopify is getting unnecessary heat today over the Yeezy hate store. They removed the store in one business day.” Commenting on Shopify’s reasons to keep the site up, he said, “Shopify isn’t counting pennies, especially ones that cost them dollars in brand reputation.”
One Shopify agency owner who spoke to Modern Retail on the condition of anonymity said he was frustrated by how long Shopify took to take down the store. It would be one thing, the agency owner said, if it was an obscure merchant who posted something that ran afoul of Shopify’s terms of use. But given that Ye has a well-documented history of antisemitic remarks, the agency owner wondered why Shopify didn’t take down the store immediately and review it later.
“To take it down in 36 hours — sure, that is technically very fast for large organizations, but just take it down first and say, ‘We are reviewing it,'” the agency owner said.
Shopify has come under scrutiny for how it has handled controversial stores in the past. In 2017, users called for Shopify to kick Breitbart News, a far-right outlet, off its platform. At the time, Breitbart sold items such as T-shirts and beer koozies calling to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. In a now-deleted Medium story, Shopify CEO Lütke said that to eliminate Breitbart’s site would be to “censor ideas,” Vox reported. He added that Shopify allows companies to use the platform “even if they are unpopular or if we disagree with their premise, as long as they are within the law.”
In 2018, though, Shopify tweaked its rules to bar anyone selling items “seeking to promote hate or violence,” a spokesperson confirmed to Bloomberg. As part of that, Shopify banned shops associated with the Proud Boys. It did, however, keep up Breitbart’s store, as well as that of Libs of TikTok, an anti-LGBT social media account.
In 2021, Shopify took down two online stores related to U.S. President Donald Trump following the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington, DC. One shop was run by Trump’s campaign, while the other was run by The Trump Organization, per Forbes.
Anna Hensel contributed reporting.