Online payments
NMI payment gateway with a merchant account, set up by Stratamize
What NMI is and is not, the merchant account behind it, and what we set up: virtual terminal, card on file, recurring billing, invoicing and checkout.
Online payments
Virtual terminal for phone and mail orders: NMI or Authorize.net
A virtual terminal in NMI or Authorize.net for phone and mail orders: keyed pricing explained, staff logins, stored cards, ACH where boarded, no hardware.
A virtual terminal is the screen in your payment gateway where you type a card number by hand: the customer reads it to you over the phone, writes it on a mail-order form, or is already on file from last time. No countertop terminal, no card reader, no software to install; a browser and a login are the whole setup. It comes with both gateways we set up, NMI and Authorize.net, and it is how a business with no storefront and no website takes its first card payment the day the merchant account is approved.
The businesses that lean on it are phone and mail-order sellers, B2B order desks taking purchase orders by phone, home-services companies collecting a deposit before the crew rolls, coaches taking installments, and nonprofits taking pledges. One thing to know first: a keyed payment costs more to process than a tapped or swiped one on every merchant account everywhere, because the card networks price card-not-present transactions higher. We put keyed payments on interchange-plus rather than a flat keyed rate padded to cover the worst case. And if most of your sales happen face to face, your main tool is Clover; the virtual terminal is for the phone.
Approvals usually come back within hours, three days at most. The virtual terminal is live the moment the gateway is, and on the setup call we create your staff users, switch on the fields you need and key the first test transaction with you.
What we set up
- Board the merchant account for keyed and phone orders from the start, so the keyed volume you told us about is the volume underwriting expects.
- Provision the gateway, NMI or Authorize.net, and hand over the virtual terminal login on the setup call.
- Create a user for each employee with the permissions their job needs, so no two people share a login.
- Switch on the address and card-code checks that qualify keyed transactions for better rates, and set the fraud rules.
- Enable the customer vault or customer profiles so repeat customers are charged from a stored card, not re-keyed.
- Enable ACH or eCheck where your merchant account is boarded for it.
- Key the first test transaction and a refund with you before a customer is on the line.
What merchants ask about the virtual terminal
Do I need any hardware to use a virtual terminal?
No. A virtual terminal is a web page inside your gateway, so a laptop, a tablet or a phone with a browser is all it takes, from the office or a job site. Nothing to lease, install or plug in. A card reader is optional and only worth adding if customers sometimes hand you a card in person; if that is most of your business, a Clover device is the better tool and the virtual terminal becomes the backup for phone orders.
Can I take phone and mail orders with it, and is that allowed?
Yes, that is exactly what it is for; the industry name is MOTO, mail order and telephone order. What matters is that the merchant account behind the gateway is boarded for it. Underwriting asks how much of your volume will be keyed, and an account boarded as a retail store that then keys every sale gets flagged, because keyed payments carry more chargeback exposure. Give us the honest mix on the application and we board the account to match.
Why does a keyed payment cost more than a swipe or a tap?
Because the card networks charge more for it. A tapped or dipped chip proves the card was present; a typed number proves nothing, so the networks set higher interchange for card-not-present transactions, on every merchant account from every provider. What differs is how the cost reaches you. A flat keyed rate is set high enough to cover the most expensive card you might ever key; interchange-plus passes through the actual rate for each card plus the same markup as the rest of your account, so a keyed debit card is not priced like a keyed corporate rewards card. Collecting the billing ZIP code and the card security code on each sale helps too, because transactions with that data qualify for better rates.
Can my staff have their own logins?
Yes, in both gateways, and they should. NMI lets us create a user per employee with permissions per user, so a clerk can key sales and look up a customer without seeing reports or issuing a refund. Authorize.net has multiple user accounts with permission levels that the account owner manages. Separate logins also give you an audit trail: every transaction records who keyed it, which matters the day a customer disputes a charge.
Does the virtual terminal do ACH?
Where boarded. Both gateways can key a bank payment from the virtual terminal: NMI has an electronic check screen beside the card one, and Authorize.net calls it eCheck. Neither works until your merchant account is boarded for bank payments, which is a separate approval from cards and not every business gets it. Tell us on the first call if you need bank payments by phone and we put ACH in the application from the start.
Is it PCI-safe to key a card from a phone call?
It can be, and the rules are mostly about what happens before the number reaches the gateway. Type the card straight into the virtual terminal while the customer is on the line. Do not write it on a notepad or an order form; do not let it sit in an email, a text, a CRM note or a voicemail; and if you record calls, pause the recording. Once the sale is run, the gateway holds the card as a token and there is nothing on your side to protect.
Done that way, a browser-based virtual terminal falls under the shorter self-assessment questionnaire written for it (SAQ C-VT), as long as the computer is not also storing card data. For repeat customers, store the card in the gateway the first time, with their consent, and charge the stored profile after that, so the number is never read aloud again. Our recurring billing page covers card on file in detail.
Where did the Authorize.net Virtual Terminal go in the new interface?
It became the Accept Payment screen. Authorize.net offers a newer merchant interface alongside the classic one, and there the keyed-payment screen is called Accept Payment. It runs the same transactions against the same merchant account; the fields are arranged differently and some options moved. If your staff is trained on the classic screen, we show you where each setting went before you switch.
What does a virtual terminal cost per month?
From us, nothing on top of the gateway: the virtual terminal is a standard feature of both NMI and Authorize.net, not an add-on, and we do not charge separately for it. What you pay is the gateway fee and the processing on each transaction, which we quote together in writing. Authorize.net publishes its own gateway fees, and we cover those on our Authorize.net page rather than here. The per-transaction side is the one to understand: a keyed sale costs more to process than a swiped one, and that is a processing matter, not a virtual terminal fee. Send us your expected keyed volume and we will quote the whole picture.
Transparent pricing
We quote the gateway fee and processing together so there is no second surprise; ask us for a quote.
Ready to take payments online?
Tell us how you sell and we will recommend the gateway and the setup, in writing. Our team is based in Newnan, Georgia, and we work with businesses nationwide.
- Apply online with your need already selected.
- Confirm your email, then complete the secure application.
- After approval, we provision your gateway and set it up with you.