How to earn money online apart from ecommerce platform?
Tons of ways. Here are some that I’ve done personally:
Flipping art and other collectibles on eBay.
Airbnb Arbitrage. You can do this almost all online, since you can hire out people to do most of the manual labor for you, including vetting apartments. We ran this 100% remotely for a while. Though there are risks involved, especially if you hire more people.
A low effort way of making money online is service arbitrage. You hire services for cheap and you sell the same services for a higher price and make the spread on it.
Convincing businesses to pay your for SEO services by demonstrating value upfront.
Selling digital goods on Etsy. This has a time tradeoff upfront of having to make the digital products.
Though my favorite for scale is e-commerce due to its scalability and slightly less time effort in that you generally don’t have to create the products.