Virtual Terminal

Business it’s all about timing. That and playing phone tag.

While the concept of a virtual terminal is simple – a payment application you securely log into online to process a credit card – many businesses greatly under-utilize their virtual terminals and suffer from miss sales opportunities, delay collection of receivables, and losses to bad debt.   And while any payment processor can offer a virtual terminal service, at Merchant Solutions LLC we’ll show you how to leverage your virtual terminal solution to better your business.

Virtual terminals are more than just convenience, they are the backbone of many businesses payment acceptance. They are the basic service upon which other features are layered to create a payment flow to meet you and your client’s needs. Collect more, collect faster, and pay less to do it.

Here are some of the ways in which Merchant Solutions LLC can help improve your business through the smart implementation of virtual terminal services:

Process payments from anywhere: log in to your virtual terminal to manually key in card numbers or, if you have your client in front of you, take a card present (swipe/chip) payment on any device from anywhere you have internet access and print or email the receipt to your client.

Gateway services and integrations: Virtual terminals and gateways are often used interchangeably, but they are two different services. A gateway is a middleware that connects a processing account to a shopping cart or software.   Most payment gateways include a virtual terminal service as well.

Card on file: The ability to keep a card on file means never having to generate a receivable. All of our virtual terminal options have the ability to “store” a card on file for your client. You do not retain the card locally (no additional data security required) and only have access to the last 4 digits. Through tokenization, the virtual terminal allows you or your staff the ability to charge the card for future orders.

Recurring payments: If you have a service or product that has a monthly payment that is the same each month, automated recurring billing also you to “set it and forget it”. You select the payment schedule, the dollar amount, and number of times the payment should recur. The system will automatically process the transaction and email your client a receipt. You can even select to be notified on declines, set up payment reminders, and even report on when cards are expiring. Also great for payment plans for clients with large balances.

Electronic invoicing: If you invoice your clients, here’s a way to do so and get paid faster. Instead of snail-mailing a paper invoice, you can create an itemized invoice which you email to your client with a “click here to pay” option. They click the link, input their card information, and the invoice is marked “paid” on your end.

Mobile payments: Mobile payments are yet another way to accelerate your payment collection, and we’ll show you how to tie mobile payments into your virtual terminal so that you have overall reporting and just one stream of payments to manage.

Web Payment Forms: Do you have a few short items to sell online, such as event tickets, gift cards, etc? Or, do you issue invoices and want to set up a convenient way for your clients to pay you faster? We’ll show you how to leverage web payment forms. These are simple hosted payment forms that require little or no technical expertise and allow you to collect payment online without any additional web security requirements.

ACH too!: If your business collects payment via ACH, you know it’s the lowest cost method to collect payments. However, it is often inconvenient for your staff and for your clients to use separate credit card and ACH systems. We can streamline this process by providing virtual terminals that accept both credit and ACH transactions through a single consolidated system.   You can even implement credit or ACH options on your online payment forms, invoices, or recurring payments to get the low ACH rates as often as possible without adding the confusion inherent in multiple systems.

Business Level 2 / Level 3 interchange: If your business accepts payment via credit card from other businesses, we can provide systems to drive the underlying cost down drastically with Level 2 and Level 3 interchange data. This additional transaction data means transactions with an underlying fee of 2.95% can come down to 1.85% or sometimes even lower. We’ll show you how.

Reporting: Knowledge is power. By having all client data in one system, you save time reconciling, you miss fewer payments, it’s harder to duplicate payments, and you don’t have to deal with cross referencing multiple payment systems. As well, follow your clients’ spending habits and leverage this information for better marketing. Virtual terminals are the point where all your transaction data can merge.

Multiple options: While the basic service is the same, every virtual terminal has different “ins and outs”. What information you are looking to record, the particulars of a given industry or set of applications that your business uses, or what “other” services you may need will result in one virtual terminal service being a better fit for your business than another. But how do you compare? Merchant Solutions LLC represents dozens of different virtual terminal and gateway providers and will put in the work to determine which best fits your business needs.