multiple shop pages

You can use shortcodes:
https://docs.woothemes.com/document/woocommerce-shortcodes/
to make a page for a single category, for example:
[product_category category=”shirts”]
Unfortunately shortcode output doesn’t paginate so that could be a problem if you have more than a page full of products in a category.

The shop page will paginate, and you can call it with the appropriate url:
https://www.mydomain.com/product-category/shirts/
to show products in that category. The exact form of the url will depend on your permalink setting.

Thank Iorro. I will dive into that. Regarding the pagination feature, is seems like something that I could work around with some well placed links. Yes? Is this an example of why the shop page is superior to gallery pages? If so, are there any other glaring weaknesses with gallery pages that I should know about.
As I said, I am brand new to this, so this will be my first experience with short codes. Good luck to me.

The shop page is superior in that it can paginate products, and if you call it with the right url, it will show products in a specific category. However, one category page will look much like another, although there is limited scope for non html category-specific content which can be entered at Admin page > Products > Categories > (category) > Description.

But if you setup your category pages with shortcodes, each category page can look quite different and include category-specific html content above and below the products. But no pagination, so you would need to limit the number of products in each category to a sensible number that will display on a single page.

Perfect answer for me, Lorro – I will have one page with loads of houses to let, and a few other pages containing three or four service offerings each.

(BTW – if anyone knows of good lettings plugins, or property maintenance plugins (or addons), I’d be very grateful to hear about them!)

This topic is of interest to me, since I will have live classes for purchase, and jewelry in different collections. If I understand correctly, instead of making a separate shop page for the classes and each of the jewelry collections, I can instead create categories that could be chosen from a drop-down link or menu, for example, that will show up as their own page although actually part of the one shop page? Is that right?

Yes, if you go to Appearance > Menus, there is a “Product Categories” section of links. If you don’t see it, enable it in screen options.