Virtual Terminal Card Payments

virtual terminal card paymentsoffer a simpler payment processing solution for small businesses that don’t always meet their customers face to face. These merchants often take orders via email or phone, or accept mail-in or online invoices, and can benefit from being able to process credit cards and ACH payments from the comfort of their home office or other remote location.

To process a payment, a business simply logs into its virtual terminal through an online portal (usually with a web based desktop, tablet or mobile app) and enters the customer’s credit card or bank account information. A USB card swiper is often used to facilitate card-present transactions and speed up data entry, but this is not required for virtual terminals as long as the business has a computer with internet access. The virtual terminal then sends the transaction information to the processor and is approved within seconds. Once approved, funds are then deposited into the merchant’s bank account.

Most virtual terminals are integrated with a secure payment gateway that enables advanced features like tokenization and end-to-end encryption to help protect sensitive customer information. This minimizes PCI scope and liability while providing an efficient and secure means to process credit card, eCheck and ACH payments.

Most virtual terminals also enable recurring billing for repeat customers, which can be a time-saving feature for businesses that don’t need to manually process each new billing cycle. To set up a recurring billing payment, a business simply enters the customer’s credit card or ACH details into its virtual terminal and selects the frequency and duration of the automatic payments.