As someone who's done quite a bit of e-commerce solutions architecture for ecommerce businesses leveling up, I can say without a doubt the worst solution you could choose for a newly created store in 2018, would be roll out a home grown build.

You need to choose the solution that is best for your friend's business over the long term, not what is most interesting as a dev.

Use Shopify, as it's the most scalable over the long run, without a dev needed to keep the lights on. But even something like Etsy will do.

Do not go with Django / Python, and I say this as a Django dev myself. The second you get a higher priority project, your friend will be in a real jam. Maintenance with Django / Python is prohibitively expensive with freelancers, and needs a high level of engineering skill to keep up with business requirements over time.

Particularly things like packages & dependency upgrades, can lead to tech debt with cascading maintenance costs and increase likelihood of outages. Enough is changing in ecommerce around 3rd party vendor dependencies, security standards and regulations, that an un-patched Django site can get burned pretty quickly.

The cost of migrating to another ecommerce platform from something proprietary can become extremely expensive as well, so do your friend a favor and choose a scalable saas platform that will last. Good luck.