In this post, I’ll just talk about the best ecommerce courses you can take online.

Instead of recommending you a bunch of courses, I’ll only recommend one.

I’ll also talk about some other courses I took and why I think they’re not worth it for me personally.

There are no affiliate links here so I’m not incentivized if you take my recommendation or not. And if the recommended course are too expensive, I recommend a couple of things:

1. Get more money, as a few hundred dollars for an expedited education shouldn’t be a bottleneck of you starting your business. Also, a lack of initial funds make e-commerce really difficult as you’ll need to pay much more in advertising to learn.
2. YouTube is a close second teacher. Don’t think you have to pay for courses in order to be successful. YouTube has visual tutorials for all kinds of things and will be more than enough for you to launch your e-commerce career.
3. Books, like 12 Months to $1 Million is also a great resource. Though books get outdated quick and they only teach high-level ideas (i.e. business strategies) as opposed to walking you through how to use Shopify, etc. The book referenced here is an affiliate link, but isn’t expensive to buy.

Why Courses?

You mostly only want to buy courses from gurus because you don’t even know what to search for on YouTube or Google.

YouTube is a wonderful teacher, but only if you know what to look for.

The best online courses organizes a high-level topic like ecommerce into low-level building blocks. It’s only once you understand these low-level building blocks are you able to even know what to study for.

How To Avoid Paying For The Best Ecommerce Courses Online

You can avoid paying for these courses by going to YouTube and searching for what you need. The problem is, what do you even need to know to start e-commerce?

I’ll provide you with a list here so if you don’t want to pay for a guru’s e-commerce course, you can just go ahead and YouTube / Google these topics yourself:

• How to start a Shopify store. Shopify is a platform that lets you easily collect money and fulfill orders online. Knowing this lets you sell stuff online.
• How to do product research so you know what to sell online.
• How much to charge for products you’re selling, so your business is actually sustainable from a PNL standpoint.
• Why you should avoid dropshipping at all costs. Understanding this will help you avoid shiny object syndrome and prevent you from pursuing a path down an unsustainable business model. Other words, it’ll save you a lot of time. Dropshipping is upfront convenient, but very painful in the long run.
• How to drive traffic with Google SEO or Google Shopping / YouTube ads. You should avoid using Facebook unless you have a lot of capital and is super advanced. You shouldn’t listen to GaryVee and think ‘social is the way.’ It may be the way if you’re using it as a backup platform to retarget. But you should use Google’s ecosystem to maximize your probability of early wins.

With this, you’re able to build a website (with Shopify), know what to sell and how much to charge for your products. You’ll also know how to get eyeballs on your website so people will buy your stuff (Google ads), and you’ll know what supply chain you should go with (i.e. not dropshipping).

Note of caution: a lot of these terms are monetized. Thus, trying to go the ‘free’ route you’d inevitably run into a lot of gurus trying to sell you stuff anyway.

No…I Want To Pay For The Best Ecommerce Courses Online

“Only the best for me!” you say.

I gotchu.

I’ll recommend one course, and then run through a few other popular courses and say why I think you should avoid them. I’ve taken all the courses below personally and have watched every single video / took notes, and implemented everything they said. So the below isn’t just some speculative BS – my opinion is formed from real experience in implementing the instructions in the courses below.

Charlie Brandt’s $100K Academy. This is the only course I recommend. He teaches you everything from how to build a Shopify store to how to drive traffic to it using Google Ads. He teaches you how to research products and what supply chains to use. This is the only course whose instructions I followed and actually got results.

Kevin Zhang’s Ecom Millionaire Mastery. There are lawsuits out on this guy saying he’s an alleged scammer and he sells counterfeit products. You can’t buy this course anyway because his ClickFunnels has been shut down (see below). But I’d say this was actually a pretty decent Photoshop course that teaches you how to edit and make your photos ‘pop’. I wouldn’t listen to any other advice in his course though (there’s parts where he alludes to tax evasion, dropshipping, etc).

Ecomm Clubhouse by Wholesale Ted. This teaches the basics of dropshipping and how to build a minimal viable website. I’m not a huge fan of dropshipping and I don’t think this provides much more value than what you can easily search for out there. A lot of the products she suggests I don’t agree with, and her advocacy of Facebook ads is also a terrible idea in 2021 TBH. Great high level course, but all the lower level details are now outdated. Also, a minimally viable website doesn’t really cut it anymore. You need something that really shines and pops. No worries though, Charlie’s Brandt course will cover you there.

Start & Scale 2.0 by Gretta Van Riel. I like this course because this doesn’t advocate dropshipping. I dislike this because pretty much all the information learned here can be learned through the 12 Months To A Million book. In addition, one thing I don’t like here is the heavy emphasize to build a business around Instagram. Building a business on Instagram is possible, but much more difficult than necessary and is only possible for a few select niches. Also: Instagram is pretty out of date nowadays, and TikTok is the new thing. That’s the volatility of relying on social to push your brand and why I like using Google for beginners. Googling and searching for stuff will never go out of style.

Pinterest Ads Blueprint by some Eastern European guy. I don’t like Pinterest as it is fairly restrictive in terms of brand resonance. This course is interesting but much more useful for affiliate marketers than e-commerce operators.

Pinterest Ads Masterclass: ditto objections with Pinterest Ads Blueprint.

The Nomad Brad – Bing Ads Bootcamp 2.0. Quite an interesting course, though its use is limited because while Bing gives you a blue ocean for search, the things you can sell on there is limited to selling to old people. Likewise, having split tested Google vs. Bing myself, oftentimes the latter is more expensive than the former. And the course focuses on search ads a lot of times (better for affiliate marketing) as opposed to Bing Shopping ads (better for tangible goods).

Project Verum: I’m on the fence on this one. It’s only $100 and it includes a lot of docs on hiring and team-building which I find actually educational. My main objections with this course is it teaches Facebook ads (ew) and dropshipping (which is unsustainable and a bad business model). Though I’d imagine you could purchase this course if you’ve reached some initial success with Google Ads and want to start building a team, or perhaps you’d like to be able to start using Facebook ads to retarget folks. But even Facebook retarget is garbage nowadays due to iOS14 and also with the influx of new and more engaging social media platforms (like TikTok). Other words: Great content for a reasonable price but the content’s out of date. Also, their website is “meh” to be honest compared to what you can build with Gempages – a drag and drop website builder you can install in Shopify (the Charlie Brandt course I recommended above advocates using Gempages).

TL;DR

In sum, there’s 3 tiers of people who want to learn about e-commerce.

1. If you even have an inkling of not wanting to pay for a course, just YouTube/Google the suggested topics above.
2. If you’re OK with buying a course, get Charlie Brandt’s 100K Academy. Of all the ecommerce courses online, this is the best. All the other courses overcomplicate things with Facebook ads and you’ll just yield worse results with 10X more effort.
3. You really want to splurge on guru courses for some reason. Then buy Charlie Brandt’s course for your fundamentals and Verum’s course for supplemental information (i.e. on how to build a team, and to an extent, how to craft video ads).

What about you? Is there any courses that you took that wasn’t mentioned here but is a really good recommendation?