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The Virtual Teminal. Who Needs It and Why Would You Choose It
After having writers block for a good week and not coming up with anything to blog about, I started asking my fellow co-workers for ideas. My trusty tech-guy gave me the topic of VIRTUAL TERMINALS.
Now, for those of you who may not know what a virtual terminal is please allow me to define it for you. A virtual terminal allows the merchant to process a credit card transaction from any computer with an internet connection. Can you imagine using your home computer to process all of your credit card transactions? How great would that be? This is a fantastic payment processing solution for merchants who have a home business, merchants who sell products at trade shows, merchants with a website and merchants who have a shopping cart tied to their website. Here’s an example of an account that we recently set up. The merchant was opening their business in a couple weeks. She did not have a phone line however she had an internet connection. We set up her credit card processing account with a virtual terminal and she was able to open her doors without any delay.
Just also keep in mind that if you can provide a terminal for your customers to actually swipe their card, your transactions will qualify for lower categorized rates by the card companies like Visa and MasterCard. It doesn’t change BMR’s rate, but you qualify for lower wholesale rates on the cards. So it’s always better to provide a “card present” method whereby you can swipe the card and verify identity- this is why the rates are lower because it cuts down on fraud. But if you have no way of swiping the card at all, consider the virtual terminal.
The process is very straight foreward and easy to set up. You simply type in the URL, enter your username and password and start accepting credit card sales.