look at options

I'm skeptical that the casual shopper would buy directly from a remote banner without clicking through and checking if the online store is legit,

I agree with you, I think the only way that they might be able to get someone to buy through a banner would be if there was some direct tie to the to the page. The page content would have to say something like "you can buy the item we reviewed through this banner, the vendor is reliable".

I think it's still a bit of a stretch...

onclick="Element.toggle('menu_id')"

are you doing something similar to fundable.org? What not try the simple method?

Let all the payers transfer the money directly to that one person. Then, you send an invoice to that one person for your commission and trust him to actually honor the invoice.

This is what Ebay does and it seems to be working well enough.

That makes a lot of sense, but I did not think it was easy to transfer the money directly to someone else. When people collect with ebay they are forced to sign up for a paypal account.

This does lower the cost, but it I think it significantly raises the transaction activation energy.

Am I wrong?

Yes. Fundable forces users to sign up for a paypal account or pay by check. It does raise the transaction activation energy but i think this is the best way to circumvent the double-fees problem.

try fundable.org

closer to site context: what are the implications for foreign applicants to the ycombinator fall program?

We (2 guys at the moment) are currently looking for 1 or 2 more cofounders for our finance-related startup project. We are currently in the midst of building the demo, hopefully in time for the Ycombinator winter application, and would love to expand the team.

The startup project is finance-related (forex, stocks, options etc.). If you are interested, do contact me at stepwok|gmail.com and i will provide more details about the project. If you are a regular at elitetrader.com/nuclearphynance.com, we would love to hear from you.

why not? with the increasing efficiency in cross border communications, i don't see how remote hiring wouldn't work.

seems like you're getting screwed. Try to get a better deal or jump ship. Man do i hate people who screw others.

rewriting code isn't as bad as some would claim. Because the logic of the code has already been set, a rewrite of the app in another language should take no more than 2 weeks. This is esp. true if your app uses an MVC framework where the view template is separated from the logic.

If you can replace the whole system, yes. It's most of the case for early statups where you have only a few developers communicating intimately.

When you write components used by multiple groups, things get far more complicated; you have to provide some stubs so that other party's old code keeps working until they finish migration. Here, at least doing protocol right is essential. (Web app has advantage here, since you can just ride on existing protocols.)