TORONTO — Shopify’s general counsel said the company took down musician Kanye West’s online store because of the potential for fraud, not because it was selling a Nazi T-shirt, an internal staff announcement obtained by The Logic reveals.

In the message, which was posted on Shopify’s Slack Tuesday morning, general counsel Jess Hertz said the swastika-emblazoned T-shirt listed for sale by West was “a stunt” and “not a good faith attempt to make money.” This, Hertz added, “brought with it the real risk of fraud.” It was for this reason, she added, that the store had been closed.

The Nazi T-shirt had been for sale on West’s Shopify-powered store since early Monday, with Shopify taking it offline around 24 hours later. In a public statement issued following the takedown, Shopify spokesperson Caty Gray said it had removed the Yeezy store because the “merchant did not engage in authentic commerce practices” and was in violation of the company’s terms.

In the internal announcement, Hertz gave more detail than the company has shared publicly. She said West’s Nazi T-shirt was “vile, disgusting, and inexcusable” and that “everyone agrees with that.” But that didn’t affect Shopify’s decision to delete West’s online store, Hertz added. “Opinion doesn’t factor in here,” she said. “What matters is our terms of service.”

Hertz added that Shopify’s focus on its terms, acceptable use policy and other policies allowed it to “remove as much subjectivity as possible” when making decisions about content moderation.

West, also known as Ye, bought a Super Bowl ad on Sunday to direct people to his website. The site’s content was then replaced with the white T-shirt, named “HH-01” with a black Nazi swastika printed on it. The T-shirt cost $30. The store is now unavailable, replaced by an error message.

The Yeezy store used technology from Shopify, including its Shop Pay, checkout tool, which earns the company a fee when a customer completes a transaction with the store.

Shopify does not pre-screen products sold via its platform. But its policy on acceptable use says its merchants can’t do anything illegal, and that they “can’t call for, or threaten, violence against specific people or groups.” Bloomberg reported last year that the company removed language from its policy banning “hateful content” in July 2024.

As The Logic first reported, Shopify executives were aware of the Yeezy swastika T-shirt as of Monday afternoon. The company instructed its support staff not to comment if its merchant clients contacted them about West’s use of its platform, and to end the conversations if the merchants didn’t have questions about their own store. 

The company also reported fourth-quarter earnings on Tuesday, posting US$2.81 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter, up 31.2 per cent year over year. On the firm’s earnings call, Shopify president Harley Finkelstein did not answer a question that referenced the Yeezy incident.

West’s relationship with Shopify dates to at least May 2016, when he used the platform to sell both his music and his clothing line. In September 2020, Shopify hired Jon Wexler, the executive who had run West’s Yeezy sneaker collaboration with Adidas, to run the influencer program it was launching. Wexler has since left the company.   

Adidas is among the brands that have stopped working with West since 2022 over his antisemitic social media posts.

A source told The Logic that after the T-shirt appeared on the Yeezy site, a Shopify employee posted in the company’s internal Slack to say they and a number of other Jewish employees felt uncomfortable and unsafe that the company had kept the store online for so long, with the item available for purchase. The Logic agreed not to name the source because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Hertz’s internal message on Tuesday acknowledged that the company “did take time to come to this outcome,” but said “reactive termination of a store is never good for our ecosystem.”

“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 instituted its acceptable use policy in August 2018, following criticism over its handling of right-wing groups using its platform to make money. The terms allow “space for all types of products, even the ones that we disagree with, but not for the kind of products intended to harm,” CEO Tobi Lütke said in a blog post at the time. He had previously argued that Shopify should not withdraw services from merchants because “products are speech and we are pro free speech.”