Yes. In late June 2026, Shopify notified merchants that it no longer supports the sale of Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS) and instructed them to remove all e-cigarette products by July 8, 2026. Merchants who did not comply risked product suspension and store termination. The policy was never published as a single public rule page; it was enforced through individual merchant notices, which is a big part of why it felt sudden and arbitrary to affected sellers.

Reports of the ban surfaced on June 23, 2026. Shopify's merchant notices went out on June 24, 2026, with a removal deadline of July 8, 2026 — roughly 18 days. By mid-July 2026, merchants in Shopify's own community forum were reporting closed stores and removed product listings. Enforcement continued through August 2026, when hardware-only sellers learned they were not exempt.

According to merchant reports, no — not in practice. Sellers who only sold batteries, empty pods, vaporizers, and accessories (no nicotine and no cannabis) reported being caught by the same enforcement. A Shopify Partner summarized the wording in the notices as covering "parts and refills regardless of nicotine content," meaning hardware-only did not exempt a store. A device being federally lawful does not override a private platform's decision to stop supporting the category.

There was no reported carve-out for FDA-authorized products. The notices were framed as a platform-level decision about the ENDS category as a whole, not a judgment about individual products. That means an FDA-authorized device was subject to the same removal requirement as an unauthorized import. Sellers should not assume that carrying only PMTA-authorized products protects a store on a platform that has decided to exit the category.

The move followed sustained pressure from a bipartisan coalition of roughly 25 U.S. state attorneys general targeting the illegal e-cigarette market — a segment the coalition described as a multi-billion-dollar problem. Reuters reported the platform's move on June 23, 2026, and attorneys general in Illinois, California, and Massachusetts publicly welcomed it. Shopify's own help documentation already positioned ENDS products as regulated and restricted, and its payments eligibility rules exclude high-risk categories including tobacco-related products.

The strongest general-purpose alternative is WooCommerce, because it is self-hosted and open source and imposes no platform-level product-category ban — you keep control of the store and the payment gateway. Adobe Commerce (Magento) suits larger catalogs, BigCommerce is a hosted option whose acceptable use policy is built around lawful use rather than category bans and supports many gateways, and Shoplazza is built specifically to allow ENDS and vape sales. Swell offers explicit vape acceptance with native subscriptions for D2C brands. The decisive factor is usually not the storefront but whether you can get a high-risk payment processor approved.

This is the question many merchants explored in August 2026, and the answer depends on whether Shopify is restricting only checkout and payments or the underlying product listings. Reports indicate the restriction is categorical and tied to the product category, not just the payment rail, and Shopify's Shop channel and payments eligibility pages list ENDS-related products as prohibited. Merchants should verify their specific account status directly with Shopify support before assuming an alternative checkout keeps them compliant.

There is no indication of a reversal. Because the policy was driven by attorney general pressure rather than a temporary technical rule, and because Shopify never published a public policy page to negotiate against, affected merchants reported that appeals rarely went anywhere when ENDS was the core of the business. Sellers should plan on the ban being permanent and build their storefront and payment stack around that assumption rather than waiting for the platform to change course.