I want to create an e-commerce site, and also have the ability to easily create landing pages, using the wonderful responsive layouts of the panopoly landing page editor.
What is the easiest way to go?
How to do it successfully? And did somebody do it?
I would do #2. To my knowledge, all of the modules in Commerce Kickstart can be downloaded separately; Commerce Kickstart just offers some default configurations. If you run into trouble setting up the Commerce modules, you can always install a copy of Commerce Kickstart on a local machine/another server and reference that while you are setting up your main site.
By contrast, the problem with #1 is that not all of Panoply is easily configurable if you are not using that distribution (for example, the responsive layouts). So it will be much easier to use that, especially if you are going to host it on Pantheon, which is behind Panoply.
You could edit the distribution makefile but that is probably more trouble than it's worth; the Commerce modules are designed to be installed on any Drupal site, so adding them to Panoply is very straightforward.
