What is a virtual terminal?
It is a secure web page, provided by your gateway, where you enter a customer's card details manually to take a payment. No hardware, no card reader — just a browser and your login. It is the digital equivalent of keying a card into a countertop terminal, but it runs from anywhere you can sign in.
Who uses a virtual terminal?
- Phone and mail order businesses — take the card over the phone, key it in.
- Service businesses — plumbers, consultants, tradespeople invoicing after a job.
- B2B sellers — processing purchase orders and account payments.
- Anyone without a storefront — no fixed terminal, but still needs to take cards.
How is it different from a payment link or online checkout?
With a virtual terminal, you enter the card details. With an online checkout or payment link, the customer enters their own. Both run on the same gateway, and most businesses use a mix — a checkout on the website, a virtual terminal for phone orders and follow-ups. The virtual terminal is about staff-entered payments; the checkout is about customer-entered ones.
Is keying in cards secure?
Handled properly, yes. A reputable gateway's virtual terminal is PCI-compliant, encrypts the card data, and does not store full card numbers in your browser. You should still follow basic card-handling discipline — never write full numbers down, never store them in a spreadsheet — but the terminal itself is built for exactly this.
Getting a virtual terminal
A virtual terminal comes as part of a gateway. VOXEPAY deploys gateways such as NMI and Authorize.Net that include a virtual terminal, so if your business takes phone or invoice payments, it is available from day one alongside your online checkout.