What should a Shopify brand do when an ADA demand letter cites pages it no longer has?

When a demand letter cites pages your store no longer has, respond with evidence, not admissions. Document the current state of each cited page, pull records showing when it changed or was removed, and keep everything. Citing a stale page weakens the claimant's position, but it does not make the letter go away, and anything you say about the old pages can still be used. Let your attorney decide what the timeline proves.

Stale citations are common, not a technicality

Demand letters are often built from scans run weeks or months before the letter is sent. Themes change, templates get redesigned, apps get uninstalled. A letter citing your old product page template is not necessarily sloppy lawyering. It is just old data. Treat it as information about what the claimant's scan found, not as a description of your site today.

That said, a stale citation is useful. It tells you the claimant is working from a snapshot, which means their evidence has a date on it. Your job is to build a better-dated record of your own.

Screenshot and archive the current state immediately

For every cited URL, capture the current state: screenshots, the rendered HTML, and the HTTP response. If the page is gone, capture the 404 or the redirect. If the template changed, capture the new template. Do this before making any further changes, because the letter itself is now a reason to preserve evidence, and spoliation concerns cut both ways.

Pull your deployment and theme records for the cited pages. Theme version history, app install logs, and publish dates for template changes establish the timeline. If the cited barrier existed on the old template but not the new one, the timeline shows it. If it exists on both, the timeline shows that too, and your attorney needs to know.

Do not explain the old pages in writing

The temptation is to reply with an explanation: that page was redesigned, that feature was removed, the letter is out of date. Do not do this without counsel. Explanations about old pages are admissions about old pages, and the letter is about the old pages. A short acknowledgment that the letter was received, routed to counsel, is the right first response.

This is also why the evidence work matters. Your attorney can use a clean timeline to negotiate from strength: the cited pages changed on these dates, the current site was scanned on this date, here is what the current scan shows. That is a settlement conversation. An email explaining your redesign history is a liability conversation.

Scan the current site and start the remediation log

In parallel with the legal response, run a full accessibility scan of the current site and begin remediating what it finds. Log every fix with a date. This serves two purposes. First, it reduces the chance of a second letter citing the current pages. Second, it builds the good-faith record that matters in every ADA negotiation: a brand that scans, fixes, and documents is in a fundamentally different position from a brand that waits.

Keep the remediation log separate from the legal file but consistent with it. The log is a business record of ongoing accessibility work. If the matter settles, the log becomes the compliance plan. If it does not, the log is evidence.