Best Practices to Accept Credit Cards Face-to-Face

Cards are considered accepted in a face-to-face setting when the card and the cardholder are both physically available during the transaction. Card acceptors that accept credit cards face-to-face include grocery stores, restaurants, coffee shops, etc.

The credit card associations also consider payments made at unattended terminals, such as gas stations, as face-to-face. In such settings the card acceptor never actually has possession of the card, it is still swiped through a physical machine which is sufficient to qualify.

Card-present payments are less plagued by fraud than non-face-to-face ones, because the card acceptor has much more tools at her disposal to validate the legitimacy of the card and cardholder. What is more, retailers are required to ensure, to the best of their ability, that all transactions are valid.

To achieve that goal, card acceptors should to develop procedures for processing face-to-face payments and provide sufficient training to the staff operating the terminals. Listed below are our suggestions for the card acceptance procedures that you need to incorporate into your payment processing manual.

Follow these steps and you will be in compliance with Visa and MasterCard regulations:

1. Card swiping. First, swipe the card through the terminal. Then take the credit card from your customer.
2. Verify the card's authenticity. Examine the card and ensure that it has not been changed in any way.
3. Get the customer's signature. If the transaction is authorized, obtain a signature from your customer on the sales receipt.
4. Verify the signature. Compare the signature your customer just made to the one on the card and ensure that they match.
5. Return the card. Once you are satisfied with the validity of the card and the authenticity of your customer, return the card and a copy of the sales receipt to complete the transaction.

If you have grounds to doubt that either the card or the cardholder may not be genuine, make a Code 10 call to your processor's authorization center and you will be instructed on how to proceed.