Shopify

As of August 13, 2026, Shopify was powering the online merchandise store (t-shirts and stickers) of the Dominion Society, a Canadian group whose platform calls for deporting or stripping citizenship from roughly 9 million people, about one-fifth of Canada's population. Shopify's Acceptable Use Policy explicitly prohibited 'hateful content' promoting or condoning hate or violence based on protected characteristics until sometime between March and June 2024, when the language was quietly narrowed to bar only direct calls for or threats of violence against specific people or groups; Shopify's own Shop app continued to display the older, stricter policy. A Shopify spokesperson told The Tyee the company acts as 'infrastructure rather than an arbiter of what gets bought and sold' and does not remove merchants over objections to their worldview.

Between May and August 2026, Shopify's head of public policy and government relations for Canada, Michael Liboiron, and CEO Tobi Lutke publicly criticized Canada's Bill C-22 lawful-access legislation, which would give law enforcement expedited access to digital information from electronic service providers. At an ITIF webinar (reported June 24, 2026), Liboiron said the bill 'endangers small and mid-sized Canadian businesses' due to compliance burdens that 'can be existential,' and warned that weakening cybersecurity or enabling backdoor access 'sends a signal to the rest of the world' that damages Canadian tech's reputation. Lutke posted on X that the bill 'may well end up dealing a death blow to Canadian tech viability' and called for it to be scrapped. The bill passed the House of Commons in June 2026 with amendments (reduced metadata retention, no decryption/backdoor mandate) before heading to the Senate.

Canadian shareholder advocacy group SHARE, filing on behalf of the United Church of Canada pension plan, put forward a proposal at Shopify's 2026 AGM asking the board to adopt a formal responsible AI policy committing to internationally recognized human rights standards, citing risks of misinformation, fraud, and privacy harm from unregulated AI use. Shopify's board called the proposal 'a solution in search of a problem,' pointed to its existing general code of conduct (which does not mention AI) and board members' AI experience, and urged a vote against it. On June 16, 2026, 86.14% of shareholders voted down the proposal. SHARE noted Shopify lags peers such as eBay that have adopted specific responsible-AI policies addressing hallucination and discrimination risks.

In January 2026, Shopify cut approximately 100 people (~33%) from its Partnerships division, followed by at least 30 more from Revenue Operations in April/May 2026. CEO Tobi Lutke's April 2025 'AI-before-headcount' memo continues to guide the company's hiring decisions. (Note: an earlier, unrelated internal sales-fraud investigation at Shopify, originally bundled into this incident, was split out as its own incident — see the separate 2025 sales-fraud/exec-departure record.)

An internal fraud probe that began around mid-2024 found Shopify's commission-on-projections structure had incentivized sales staff to inflate revenue projections; the company fired implicated employees around June 2025. Chief Revenue Officer Bobby Morrison and COO Kaz Nejatian subsequently departed amid the fallout, reported by The Logic and the Globe and Mail on November 24, 2025. This is a distinct, earlier event from Shopify's separate January-2026 Partnerships/Revenue Operations layoffs, from which it was originally (incorrectly) bundled into a single incident record.

Briskin v. Shopify class action lawsuit alleged the Shop app collected user personal data and shopping behavior without adequate consent, sharing it with third parties.

Shopify dismantled its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in early 2025, following a broader trend among tech companies retreating from DEI commitments.

Shopify eliminated approximately 2,300 jobs (20% of staff) in May 2023. CEO Tobi Lütke acknowledged the company had over-invested in growth during the pandemic e-commerce boom.

Shopify has been one of the largest contributors to the Ruby on Rails ecosystem, open-sourcing numerous developer tools and libraries, and employing core Rails maintainers.

Shopify created its Sustainability Fund to invest in carbon removal technologies, committing over $54 million to various climate projects including direct air capture and biomass carbon removal.