Several media reports are confirming a significant rise in interest in traditional hobbies. The London based Daily Telegraph has reported the trend and quoted some supporting evidence from eBay where there has apparently been a 30% increase in stamp sales over just one month recently.

Traditional collecting hobbies like philately, coin collecting, football programmes etc. really work well with the online auction model. Not only are they easy for sellers to display online but also convenient and relatively cheap to post to successful bidders.

When eBay first exploded on the scene, I can recall traditional dealers and auction houses doing their very best to pour cold water on the site. Plainly dealers felt threatened by the ability such sites have to "cut out the middle man" and allow collectors to receive a greater share of the worth of their items. Every opportunity was taken to talk up the potential for rogues and fools to operate online and, in the wild west days of the Internet, they may have been right to do so. However,with eBay acquiring Paypal and developing it in to the simplest, safest and most successful online payment system for P2P online trading, things are now a great deal better. Buying on eBay and using Paypal affords collectors a very high level of protection against rogue sellers with up to 45 days usually allowed for buyers to make a claim for non-delivery or, importantly, items not being as they were described.

Today things have changed and there are many top UK Stamp Dealers who now operate stores on eBay and, to my eyes, they appear to be flourishing by working with eBay rather than trying to ignore the intenet. If anything it is now the old media that produce philatelic magazines packed full of expensive dealer adverts that have in fact become the real casualties of eBay and the wider internet.

In other reports where we hear the likes of Maria Sharapova, President Nicolas Sarkozy and Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood are among high profile names being associated with stamp collecting and again this report uses evidence from eBay saying sales of stamp collecting and specialist philatelic books have nearly doubled in just one week! It strikes me that eBay is volunteering valuable market research to its competitors!

Success in business is all about positioning your product or service to take advantage of the shifting sands of customer needs and demands. There are some good, cheaper alternatives to eBay struggling to grow alongside the San Jose giant and, in my view, they need to see and exploit these kind of opportunities quickly by using the advantage they have of being smaller and more adaptable to directly appeal to such obvious markets.