The fastest-growing segment of credit card use today
is in “card-not-present" transactions in which a customer makes
his or her purchase by mail order or telephone order (MOTO), by facsimile,
or via the Internet instead of being physically present at the merchant's
location.
If you want to process credit cards for Internet, telephone, or mail
order transactions, you'll need a special merchant account specifically
designed for that purpose. Because you never take physical possession
of a credit card so that you can swipe it through a magnetic strip reader,
both Visa and MasterCard use different criteria for evaluating risk
and have different fee structures for card-not-present transactions.
