Virtual terminal
A web page in your dashboard for keying in card payments without hardware.
A virtual terminal is a secure form in your payment dashboard where staff manually enter a customer's card details to take a payment. It's the standard tool for phone and mail (MOTO) orders and for businesses that don't have a physical card reader.
How it works
You sign into your processor's dashboard, open the virtual terminal, and type in the amount along with the card number, expiry date, security code, and billing address. The form posts to the same gateway your website checkout would use, so it authorizes in real time and settles in that day's batch with everything else. Most send the customer a receipt, hold a reference for reconciliation, and let you refund from the same screen. The terminal is usually included with the account, though gateway-led providers may bill $10 to $25 a month for it.
Pricing is where a virtual terminal actually costs you. Every sale you key in is a card-not-present, keyed transaction at your highest standard rate, and the fraud liability stays with you. 3D Secure cannot run, because the cardholder is not there to answer the challenge. Access matters too: anyone with a login can take a payment or push a refund, so give staff individual users and keep refund rights narrow. And teams drift into keying out of habit, for sales a payment link or an invoice would handle more cheaply. Pull a monthly count and ask which of them needed it.
Worked example
A wholesale supplier keys 40 phone orders a month into the virtual terminal, averaging $600 each. That is $24,000 at 3.5% + $0.15, or $846, plus a $15 gateway fee: $861. Move 30 of those orders to emailed payment links at 2.9% + $0.30 and the monthly total drops to about $758. A saving of roughly $1,200 a year, for changing nothing but how the customer is asked to pay.
Frequently asked questions
- Is a virtual terminal the same as a payment gateway?
- No. A gateway is the plumbing that carries card data to the processor; a virtual terminal is one front end sitting on top of it, a web form your staff type into. A website checkout, a payment link, and a virtual terminal can all feed the same gateway. What separates them is who enters the card details, and where.
- Do I need a website to use a virtual terminal?
- Not at all. It runs from your processor's dashboard in a browser: no website, no hardware, and no integration work. That makes it the usual starting point for a tradesperson or a clinic, and for wholesalers who invoice or take orders by phone. You do still need an approved merchant account with mail and telephone order processing enabled on it.
- Is it cheaper to use a virtual terminal or a payment link?
- The link, normally. Keying a card into a virtual terminal is priced as a keyed transaction, typically your most expensive standard rate, while a link is priced as ordinary e-commerce. It is safer as well, because the customer types their own card number on the processor's hosted page and it never passes through your staff or your systems.