Process Payment By Touch Tone Phone

[winxmaster]

I travel quite a bit to sales shows and don’t always have access to the internet, for a virtual terminal, or a land phone line to plug credit card processing equipment into (wireless card processors way too expensive).

I have seen companies that let you process your credit card transactions on the spot completely over a touch tone phone either by cell or land line. This seems like the perfect solution for me.

Any info or thoughts on this type of processing? Any ideas on good providers?

PS: Very happy I found this site! Will pass it along to the others at the shows.

[stymiee]

This type of processing is definitely possible. It's usually called Touch tone processing but is also known as ARU. It tends to cost more then using a credit card terminal but not too much more. The only real catch to it is that you must get an imprint of every card your process to verify you really had the card present at the time of sale. Otherwise there's nothing different about it then a regular merchant account. You shouldn't have a hard time finding someone who offers it if you shop around (which is what you should be doing anyway).
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John Conde

[winxmaster]

You post "The only real catch to it is that you must get an imprint of every card your process to verify you really had the card present at the time of sale".

Is this a legal requirement or just a good idea? The sites that I have checked so far say that their touch tone processing service is good for phone orders, e-mail orders, and vendor cart point of sale orders, online form orders and actually any sale that involves a credit card.

If you take an order over the phone or an e-mail order and process the credit card using a virtual terminal or manually keying in the card numbers using a wireless or land line card processor, you are never able to get an imprint of a card.

I guess with an e-mail order you have the e-mail as proof but with an over the phone order you have no proof at all. For the phone order even phone records will only show a call and no proof of a sale.

So I really need to know if an imprint is required by law or just good to have in case of a charge dispute. If I don't need the imprint I will also be able to use touch tone processing for on the road phone orders (which I often have the chance to get but now pass up. If I need an imprint then I won't be able to take these phone orders).

Thanks

[winxmaster]

Anybody home?