A phone or mail order merchant account will allow your business to grow while giving your customers a fast and convenient method to pay you. Why wait for a check to arrive when you can accept credit cards from your customer easily and securely over the phone or in the mail? Our low cost Virtual Terminal is perfect for any business processing transactions in a non face-to-face environment.
Here is How The Process Works
- The customer will call in an order to the merchant and give them their credit card information. The merchant will then enter it into a credit card terminal or PC software. These translations require additional information. The address verification system is used to validate the authenticity of the customer’s credit card.
- The terminal or PC will then connect to our processor for authorization. Once the terminal or PC has connected it will send the credit card information, address verification and amount of the purchase.
- Our processor will then pass that information onto the bank that issued the credit card. The issuing bank will then check to see if the card is valid and see if the amount requested is available on the card and set aside the amount of the purchase for the merchant.
- The issuing bank will send back an approval number or a decline message back to our processor.
- That information will then be passed back to the credit card terminal or PC software which will give the merchant the approval number and will allow them to print a receipt for their records. It will take approximately 6-12 seconds to complete this process.
- At the end of the day the merchant may manually “settle” their terminal which will begin the final process of the transaction. In most cases it can be automatically settle the transactions at a specified time each day. Once the settlement process is initiated the funds will be transferred from the card issuing bank and will electronically deposit them into the merchant’s checking account.