What is the best way to proceed when creating an online store?

Question

Online shopping

There is an idea to create an online store with little functionality. From skills: adaptive layout, fasten plugins on jQuery + a little basic actions using jQuery. The choice fell on OpenCart (plus or minus googled and downloaded the course).
1. Would it be better to do the layout yourself or is it better to find a ready-made theme?
1.1. If I do the typesetting myself, will it be difficult to add the minimum functionality + basket, + adding goods to the basket, + when the number of goods increases, the price of the goods changes, + sorting of goods?
1.2. If the theme is to choose the most suitable theme and cut out all the extra plugins from it, redo the pictures?
2. If you know a great topic, I will be very grateful :)
3. How do you like OpenCart? Or choose something else?
There are a lot of things that I still don't understand, but I really want to understand :)

Answer 1

The novel cannot be given an unequivocal answer; everyone has their own preferences and everything is purely individual.
Judging by the questions, you are a beginner.
If you have a task to make an online store for the sale of some products, then OC is a rather complicated system IMHO.
If you just figure it out for yourself, then don’t look for the golden mean, sit down and do it.
Try vocomers, as for me it is much simpler and 100% suitable for small projects.
Plus, work on vp and vocomers is no less.

Answer 2

I tried a lot of CMS bundle based on WordPress and Joomla right away. If you are planning to seriously raise an online store for commercial purposes, with the sale of goods and its long-term development, then these options are not even close.
Don't listen to anyone. Install Octstore 2.3. The basic minimum of jambs has already been eliminated and you won’t have to step on a rake (Elementary duplicates are eliminated with the help of SeoPro and already works without tambourines as it should). Yes, you will have to invest financially in some extensions for the store (This will have to be done for any CMS one way or another), but for ocstore\opencart you will spend much less money and get more or less good solutions.