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Est. MMXXVI  ·  Twenty Courses  ·  £99 one-time or £19/mo for all

Beginner · 3 Days · 34 lessons

Automated E-Commerce Architecture

Launching an AI-managed store in three days.

A practical build of a store that mostly runs itself: catalogue and copy generated and refined with AI, imagery produced in-house, product pages written for search, and the operational loop — orders, email, support, restocking, reporting — automated end to end.

Read the syllabus
Automated E-Commerce Architecture — abstract study in translucent light

Level

Beginner

Time to complete

3 Days

Format

Online video, self-paced

Access

Lifetime, one payment

Section 01

The visionary syllabus

A practical build of a store that mostly runs itself: catalogue and copy generated and refined with AI, imagery produced in-house, product pages written for search, and the operational loop — orders, email, support, restocking, reporting — automated end to end.

Automated E-Commerce Architecture runs to roughly 3 days of guided video across 8 modules and 34 lessons, taught at beginner level. Every lesson is recorded as a screen-led demonstration: you watch the work happen, pause, and do the same thing with your own material. Nothing is presented as theory that cannot be performed within a few minutes of hearing about it.

This course sits in The 72-Hour Founder, the part of the college built around a fixed container of three days. The container is the teaching device: a deadline short enough that you cannot hide inside research forces the decisions that actually determine whether a business exists.

Enrolment is a single payment of £99 and it does not expire. That covers the full video library, the written workbook, the prompt and template pack used in the demonstrations, the student community, and every re-recorded lesson we publish as the tools change. There is no subscription, no upsell ladder and no separate certification fee — when you finish, your certificate is issued automatically.

Section 02

Who this course is for

We wrote Automated E-Commerce Architecture for a specific person: someone who has read enough about artificial intelligence to be convinced it matters and has not yet found a course that treats them as an adult with limited time. If you have watched hours of free video and still cannot point to something in your week that changed, that is not a failure of intelligence — it is a failure of sequencing, and sequencing is what a structured course provides.

You will be comfortable here if you can use a browser, a spreadsheet and email. You do not need any programming, statistics or design background. Where a technical concept is unavoidable we explain it in plain language, then show it working, then let you copy it.

You will not enjoy this course if you are looking for a passive overview of the field, an inspirational lecture series, or a promise of income without work. Every module carries an artefact — a document, a system, a page, a report — and the course is only useful in proportion to how many of those artefacts you actually build.

Students who benefit most tend to share one habit: they bring their own real material to the lessons. Your own inbox, your own product, your own client, your own messy spreadsheet. The techniques transfer, but the confidence only arrives when you have watched them work on something you care about.

Section 03

What you will be able to do

Learning outcomes are easy to write and hard to honour, so each of the statements below is tied to a specific lesson and a specific artefact you produce. If you can perform all of them without referring to the videos, you have finished Automated E-Commerce Architecture, whether or not you watched every minute.

  • Choose a product line you can actually fulfil
  • Generate catalogue copy and imagery that look professional and consistent
  • Set up payments, shipping, tax and returns correctly the first time
  • Automate the order lifecycle emails customers expect
  • Handle most support enquiries with an assistant and clean escalation
  • Read a weekly numbers report and know which lever to pull

We deliberately keep the list short. A curriculum promising thirty outcomes is usually promising familiarity rather than capability, and familiarity is what free content already provides in abundance. The value of a paid course is the small number of things you can reliably do afterwards.

Section 04

The technical blueprint, module by module

The course is built in 8 modules, sequenced so that each one depends only on what came before it. You can skip forward, but the order below is the order in which the material compounds, and students who follow it finish materially more often than those who graze.

  1. 01

    Product selection

    Margin, weight, returns risk and fulfilment reality — chosen before you fall in love with a niche.

  2. 02

    Catalogue at speed

    Titles, descriptions, specifications and search terms generated then tightened by hand.

  3. 03

    Imagery

    Consistent product and lifestyle imagery, including the shots buyers look for before they trust you.

  4. 04

    Store build

    Navigation, collections, product templates, cart and checkout.

  5. 05

    Money and logistics

    Payments, shipping rules, tax, packaging and a returns policy that protects both sides.

  6. 06

    The automated loop

    Confirmation, dispatch, delivery, review request, win-back — written once, running forever.

  7. 07

    Support autopilot

    An assistant on your order data, with a clear line to a human.

  8. 08

    Weekly operations

    The five numbers to read every Monday and the decisions each one triggers.

Each module contains between three and six lessons, a short written summary, the exact prompts and templates used on screen, and a single exercise that produces the artefact for that stage. Exercises are designed to take between fifteen and ninety minutes; anything longer has been split, because the most common reason a course is abandoned is an exercise that felt like a project.

Because this course is structured as a multi-day sprint, the modules are grouped by day rather than by topic. You can spread those days across several weeks — many students use consecutive Saturdays — but keep each day intact. The sequencing within a day matters more than the calendar between them.

Section 05

The tools you will actually use

Tools change quickly, so Automated E-Commerce Architecture teaches the underlying operation first and the current tool second. When a demonstration goes out of date we re-record it, and your access includes those updates permanently — that is the main practical reason our courses are sold once rather than rented monthly.

The stack used in the demonstrations is listed below. Wherever a free tier can complete the coursework, we use the free tier and say so. Where a paid plan is genuinely required for a specific lesson, we tell you the cost in advance, show what it unlocks, and provide an alternative path so no lesson is gated behind a subscription you did not plan for.

  • Store platforms
  • Stripe
  • Claude
  • Image models
  • Make
  • Email tools

We are deliberately tool-agnostic about the parts that matter. A student who understands why a retrieval step failed can fix it in any product; a student who memorised one interface is helpless the moment a menu moves. Expect to be taught the reasoning, then handed the shortcut.

Section 06

How the teaching works

Every lesson in Automated E-Commerce Architecture follows the same four-beat structure: the problem in plain terms, the demonstration on screen with nothing edited out, the failure mode you should expect, and the exercise on your own material. The failure mode beat is unusual and it is the one students mention most often — being shown what a bad result looks like is what makes a good result recognisable.

Video is the primary medium because this subject is watched more easily than it is read. You see the actual screen, the actual prompt, the actual moment the model gets it wrong and the correction that fixes it. Alongside the video, each module ships a written companion so you can revisit a step without scrubbing a timeline, and a copyable asset pack so you never retype a template from a video frame.

Assessment is practical and self-paced. At the end of each module you check your artefact against a short rubric — not a quiz on terminology, but a description of what a competent version of that artefact contains. Students who want feedback beyond that post their work in the community, where the same rubric is used for peer review.

There are no live sessions to miss and no cohort to fall behind. That is a deliberate choice: cohort courses have better completion statistics and worse accessibility, and we would rather a shift worker or a parent of young children finished in four months than dropped out in four weeks.

Section 07

The market context

Online retail has become a systems discipline rather than a taste discipline. The winners are rarely those with the best product photograph; they are those whose operations cost less per order — automated listing, automated service, automated reordering — which is exactly the layer AI has made accessible to a solo operator.

Product pages remain one of the last places where written quality reliably converts into money. Detailed, specific, honest descriptions answer the objections that otherwise end in an abandoned basket, and they are also what makes a page findable. Generating a hundred of them consistently is now practical, which is a structural advantage over a competitor writing them by hand at midnight.

The operational loop is where students see the largest change in their own lives. Confirmation and dispatch mail, review requests, restock alerts and support triage account for the bulk of a small store's daily labour. Automating them well converts a business that consumes every evening into one that runs on a weekly review, which is the difference between a shop and an asset.

Section 08

Where this leads

Founder-track graduates leave with an asset rather than a certificate: a live site, a working product or a trading store. Whether it grows into a full income depends on the market you chose and the work that follows, but the difference between having launched and having planned is enormous, and it is the difference this course is designed to remove.

A sensible study path continues sideways rather than upward. Students often pair Automated E-Commerce Architecture with one course from a different track — a foundations student adding a marketing course, an agentic student adding a masterclass — because capability in this field compounds across domains rather than deepening in one. Every course is the same £99, so combining two is a decision about time rather than budget.

On certification: your certificate of completion names the course, the level, the estimated hours and the date, and it links to a public page describing the curriculum so anyone can see what it involved. We make no accreditation claims. It is a credible record of work done, which is precisely what it should be.

Section 09

A realistic study plan

The most common mistake students make is starting on a Sunday with unlimited enthusiasm and no schedule. Automated E-Commerce Architecture is designed to be completed in fixed blocks, and we recommend booking them the way you would book a class you had paid to attend in person — because you have.

The sprint format asks for whole days. If five consecutive days are impossible, use five separate days across five weekends and keep a short written handover note at the end of each one, so the next session begins with orientation rather than archaeology. What does not work is fifteen minutes a night: this material requires enough continuous time to finish a stage.

Keep one document for the whole course. Every artefact, every prompt that worked, every note about something to revisit. By the end it is the most valuable thing you own from the course — more useful than the videos, because it is written in your own context and about your own work.

Section 10

What £99 includes

One payment of £99 for permanent access to Automated E-Commerce Architecture. We price every course in the college identically, at a level a working adult can decide on without a meeting, because the alternative — tiered pricing designed to make the middle option look sensible — is a sales technique rather than an education policy. Prefer to subscribe? Every course in the college is also available for £19/mo, with the same access and the same updates, cancellable at any time.

  • Lifetime access to every video lesson in the course, including all future re-recordings
  • The written module companion and exercise workbook
  • The complete prompt, template and asset pack used on screen
  • Access to the student community for peer review and questions
  • Certificate of completion with a public curriculum page
  • No subscription, no upsells, and a 14-day refund on unwatched enrolments

If the course is not right for you, write to us within fourteen days and we will refund it. We ask only that you tell us what was missing; that feedback is how the curriculum has been revised each term since the college opened.

Section 11

Questions students ask before enrolling

A short, honest set of answers. If yours is not here, the admissions team replies to every message — the contact page reaches a person, not a queue.

Do I need stock up front?
No. We cover print-on-demand, made-to-order and dropship paths as well as holding stock.
Which platform do you teach?
The architecture is platform-neutral, with demonstrations on the mainstream hosted platforms.
How long do I have access?
Permanently. Enrolment is a one-time £99 payment with no renewal, and it includes updated lessons as tools change.
Is there a monthly option?
Yes. If you would rather not pay per course, every course in the college is also available for £19/mo, cancel anytime. The one-time £99 enrolment is the better value if you plan to keep the material.
Is the teaching live?
No. Every lesson is recorded video you take at your own pace, with a written companion and an asset pack for each module.
Do I get a certificate?
Yes — a certificate of completion for Automated E-Commerce Architecture, issued automatically, with a public page describing the curriculum.
What if I want a refund?
Fourteen days, no argument, provided you have not completed the course. Email admissions and tell us what was wrong.

Also in The 72-Hour Founder

Automated E-Commerce Architecture

Beginner · 3 Days · Lifetime access