MOTO / Virtual Terminal

What is MOTO?

MOTO stands for Mail Order/Telephone Order credit card pro­cess­ing and is fol­lowed by another abbre­vi­a­tion – CNP. This one deter­mines type of trans­ac­tion: card not present.

As these names sug­gest, MOTO trans­ac­tions involve e-mail, tele­phone and/or fax and don’t require the phys­i­cal pres­ence of a credit card. Only the credit card infor­ma­tion and (option­ally) per­sonal details of the card­holder are needed.

Vir­tual Terminal

The VT (yet another indus­try acronym!)  is the most pop­u­lar method of MOTO. Because it’s web-based, it can be accessed from any­where – only a web browser and an Inter­net con­nec­tion are needed. Vir­tual Ter­mi­nals are also safe and con­ve­nient for cus­tomers – and can be reached at any hour and day of the week. All this makes Vir­tual Ter­mi­nal MOTO way ahead of other MOTO meth­ods like Dial/Touch Tone or POS (point of sale).

Advan­tages

Now you might ask who would pre­fer to use MOTO and why, when online pay­ments are both easy to imple­ment and use. The main advan­tages are:

• mobil­ity
• trust

The first aspect is obvi­ous – nowa­days you can send an e-mail or make a phone call from almost every loca­tion. But why would MOTO increase con­sumer con­fi­dence? Many cus­tomers (card­hold­ers) sim­ply do not trust small or rel­a­tively unknown mer­chants. Oth­ers are not com­pletely con­fi­dent in the secu­rity of online trans­ac­tions. Such card­hold­ers feel more secure giv­ing infor­ma­tion about their credit cards to a human being over the phone. They may also have ques­tions and would like a real per­son to lis­ten to them and pro­vide rel­e­vant answers or infor­ma­tion. It’s not just about enter­ing num­bers. It’s about hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with a live per­son that makes the difference.