Shopify E-Commerce Websites for Beginners & Freelancers
Derrick Mitchell · Designer | Teacher | Artist | Innovator
A working Shopify storefront in one course, but the freelance case studies drift into unrelated client-meeting rambles that eat runtime without teaching.
What it actually teaches
Derrick Mitchell's course is built as a straight setup walkthrough. It opens with account creation and the always-relevant question of Shopify's full plan versus the cheaper Shopify Light option, which adds a buy button to an existing site instead of hosting a full store. That distinction gets real attention: the course shows removing and re-adding the online store sales channel, which matters if a viewer already runs a WordPress or Squarespace site and just wants a product widget rather than a whole new storefront. From there it moves through theme selection with industry and catalog-size filters, logo creation, homepage slide graphics linked to collections, menu and page setup, and font and color customization.
The product management lessons are where the course earns its keep. Variable products get real depth: reordering size variants so small comes before extra-extra-large, bulk-editing prices across a group of variants, and marking items out of stock so the storefront shows "sold out" instead of a broken buy option. The lesson on embedding a Shopify buy button into a WordPress page, pasting generated HTML directly into a page builder's text mode, is a genuinely useful trick for anyone straddling two platforms. The course closes with practical launch mechanics: enabling test mode, running a mock purchase with Shopify's dummy card numbers, then disabling test mode before going live. That is exactly the kind of unglamorous step a first-time store owner forgets and regrets.
Where it loses focus
The course markets itself heavily on freelance case studies, showing how Mitchell prices and delivers Shopify sites for real clients. In practice, these sections lean far more on unstructured conversation than instruction. A discovery call with a client runs long on tangents about leather notebooks, functional medicine business models, and general small talk, without distilling the material into a repeatable framework a freelancer could apply to their own client calls. The intent, teaching discovery questions and client communication, is reasonable, but the execution rarely turns into something a viewer can extract and reuse.
The apparel design and dropshipping content promised in the course description is treated as a work in progress rather than a finished module, so anyone drawn in specifically for that angle will be disappointed. The core Shopify mechanics, by contrast, are taught clearly and at a pace appropriate for someone who has never built an online store.
Bottom line
This holds up as a beginner-level setup guide: it gets someone from zero to a functioning store with products, a styled homepage, and a tested checkout. It falls short as a freelance business course, since the client-facing material is more anecdote than method. Anyone wanting a clean path to a working Shopify store will get real value here; anyone hoping for a polished framework on pricing, discovery calls, or dropshipping should treat those claims as secondary at best.
The standout
Copying a Shopify buy button's generated HTML into a WordPress page to sell products without building a separate storefront is the one technique that could justify freelancers taking the course alone.
What you will learn
- Set up a Shopify account and choose between full Shopify and the cheaper Shopify Light plan with a buy button
- Select, install, and publish a free or paid theme, including filtering by industry and product catalog size
- Build a homepage slideshow with linked collection images and edit variant pricing, ordering, and inventory in bulk
- Add simple and variable products, set up collections, menus, and pages including a custom contact page
- Embed a Shopify buy button into a non-Shopify site like WordPress using generated HTML
- Run a test order using Shopify's test card numbers before flipping a store live
Best for: Someone who has never touched Shopify and wants a guided, click-by-click walkthrough of account setup, theme selection, and basic product management.
Skip it if: Anyone who already knows Shopify basics and wants deep freelance business guidance, since the client-facing sections drift into long unstructured conversation rather than teachable process.