Phone Rates

Mail Order/Telephone Order merchants manually key in transactions from phone orders or order forms that have been mailed or faxed over to them. As a merchant, you will receive higher discount credit card processing rates due to the risk involved in keying in a card number without being able to verify the identity of the customer as the cardholder.

We recommend that the order forms your customers sign request the customer’s billing address and expiration date. When you are keying the transaction into the terminal, you will be prompted for the street number and zip code of the billing address, as well as the expiration date. This feature is Address Verification Service (AVS). With the correct cardholder information, AVS will allow you to receive lower keyed rates than if you did not have the correct information or use AVS at all.

Some merchants might swipe a portion of their credit card transactions, but also key in more than 50% of their transactions. Merchants who key in more than 50% of their transactions will find that it is more cost-effective to have keyed merchant accounts, which would work the same as mail order/telephone order accounts, but some of the transactions would be swiped.