The fastest-growing segment of credit card use today is in “card-not-present" transactions in which a customer makes his or her purchase by mail order or telephone order (MOTO), by facsimile, or via the Internet instead of being physically present at the merchant's location.

If you want to process credit cards for Internet, telephone, or mail order transactions, you'll need a special merchant account specifically designed for that purpose. Because you never take physical possession of a credit card so that you can swipe it through a magnetic strip reader, both Visa and Mastercard use different criteria for evaluating risk and have different fee structures for card-not-present transactions.

Total Merchant Services can help you easily establish such a merchant account and the entire process will take just minutes of your time and you'll be up and running in a matter of days.