Shopify support staff were told to give “no comment” and to end online chats if merchant clients asked about the company’s technology being used by the musician Kanye West to sell a T-shirt bearing a Nazi swastika, The Logic has learned.

Yeezy, the apparel brand of musician Kanye West, is using Shopify’s technology to sell the swastika T-shirt. The Ottawa-headquartered commerce firm has yet to say publicly whether it will intervene. 

West, also known as Ye, bought a Super Bowl ad to direct people to the website. The store currently displays a single product named “HH-01,” a white T-shirt with the black version of the swastika used by the Nazi party.

A current Shopify employee told The Logic that another member of staff, who is Jewish, had said on the company’s internal Slack messaging service they were uncomfortable that West’s store had been allowed to remain online for such a long time. The post had a number of supportive emoji reactions underneath.

The Shopify employee, whom The Logic agreed not to name because they were not authorized to speak to the press, said they first saw an alert about West’s store on Shopify’s Slack messaging system at around 2 p.m. ET Monday. In a response to the alert, someone from Shopify’s incident response team said senior leadership was “on top of it.”

Around 30 minutes later, support staff tasked with speaking to Shopify’s merchant clients were told to give “no comment” if a merchant asked about West’s swastika T-shirt and to end the chat if they established the merchant didn’t have questions about their own store.

In a subsequent reply to the alert on Slack, the Shopify employee said they and a number of other Jewish employees felt uncomfortable and unsafe that the swastika T-shirt had remained online for so long and that it had taken so long to update support guidance.

Shopify did not respond to questions from The Logic about whether it was aware of the swastika T-shirt West is selling, whether the shirt violates the company’s terms of use or whether Shopify planned to remove or suspend the store.

The Yeezy store uses technology from Shopify, according to its privacy policy and data from BuiltWith, a website technology analysis tool. That includes Shop Pay, a one-click checkout tool. The commerce company charges a fee when stores use its payment processing service to complete transactions. West’s swastika-emblazoned T-shirt costs $30.

“It’s honestly heartbreaking to see your life’s work perverted by full-on friggin’ Nazis,” Brian Alkerton, who worked in sales and onboarding at Shopify from 2011 until 2015, told The Logic.

Shopify does not pre-screen products sold through its platform, but can remove items or shut down stores that are in breach of its Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). Products sold via Shopify cannot “call for, or threaten, violence” against specific groups or people, the policy reads.

A number of former Shopify employees told The Globe and Mail that the listing crossed a line. Craig Miller, an early hire and the company’s former chief product officer, said Shopify’s platform being used to sell a T-shirt with a swastika on it was “absolutely vile and disgusting.” Katie Keita, former senior director of investor relations, said she was “ashamed” to see the T-shirt listed for sale on a store hosted by Shopify.

Shopify first named West as one of its merchants in May 2016, with the artist using the platform to sell both his clothing line and album The Life of Pablo. In September 2020, Shopify hired Jon Wexler, the executive who had run West’s Yeezy sneaker collaboration with Adidas, to run a new influencer program; he has since departed.   

In October 2022, after West started posting antisemitic messages on social media, Adidas and other brands ended their partnerships with Yeezy. 

This is not the first time Shopify has been criticized for its handling of merchants with extremist views. In February 2017, CEO Tobi Lütke defended the company’s decision to continue providing services to right-wing outlet Breitbart, writing in a blog post that “products are speech and we are pro free speech.” In August 2018, he acknowledged that “neutrality is not a possibility.” The firm’s new AUP would allow “space for all types of products, even the ones that we disagree with, but not for the kind of products intended to harm.”

In an October 2018 analysis, The Logic found that several organizations identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Centre were using Shopify’s platform for their online stores. But following the Capitol invasion of Jan. 6, 2021, Shopify took down sites associated with U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign, arguing he had violated their AUP.