The big question for many people will be, what on earth is virtual terminal processing? This is a reasonable question if you’re new to card payments and this article will go some way to explaining what it’s all about and discover whether your business could benefit from such a process.

A virtual terminal is a card terminal that doesn’t actually exist at the point of sale. When you place orders over the telephone for items from a catalogue for example, and you give your card number to the operator you will be making a virtual card payment. The numbers you provide will be entered manually and your order will be processed in the same way as though you had actually entered your card into a machine.

Although virtual terminal processing is in many ways being outdated by web payments with secure payment gateways, it is still a very prominent force in payments and is widely used for telephone and mail order.

Can I get a virtual terminal?

All you need to take payments via a virtual terminal is a standard terminal and you’ll need to be processing payments via the telephone or mail. Talk to your payment processing company or find one that will do a virtual terminal service for you and you should be set up very quickly indeed.

Should I get one?

You must consider that the future of payments is going to be with credit and debit cards, so virtual terminal processing is actually a must for mail and telephone ordering. In the past this was primarily done by using cheques or postal orders. The problem with cheques is that they are virtually obsolete and banks are no longer issuing cheque guarantee cards. Accepting a cheque these days is little more than accepting a promise to pay, and no business can run on promises.

Both Cheques and postal orders are incredibly slow too, people no longer want to wait for their cheques to clear before they get their goods or services; especially when they can pay instantly online on a website. So if you have any kind of retail business that relies on ordering via telephone or mail, you simply have to forget about cheques and move into the future. Virtually everyone has a debit card these days, and not only this, they also prefer to use them.

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