Every order that does not arrive with a card in front of you — your website, the phone, the delivery platforms — costs more to collect, pays out on a different schedule, and carries a risk the in-person sale does not. None of that makes it a bad channel. It makes it a channel you should price with open eyes.
🌍 Why it costs more
The card networks charge more when the card cannot be verified in person, because the fraud rate is higher and someone has to carry it. On top of that interchange difference, remote payments usually add:
- A gateway fee, monthly or per transaction, for the service that carries the payment from your site to your processor. Sometimes bundled, rarely free.
- A higher per-item charge. Around 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction is the familiar published shape for online payments, though what you actually pay depends on your agreement.
- The disputes. Remote sales generate more chargebacks, and the ones that turn up are harder to defend. That is topic 6, and it is a real cost, not a rare event.
Put the numbers side by side once: the same $40 order, paid at your counter and paid on your website. The gap is not an argument against the online channel — the previous course showed how much it beats a marketplace — but it belongs in the arithmetic.
🧾 Who pays you, and when
This is where owners lose track, because each channel behaves differently:
| Channel | Who deposits | When | The trap |
| Your own site | Your processor | Like any other sale, a day or two | None, once you have checked one deposit |
| Phone order | Your processor, keyed by hand | Same | Keyed sales are card not present and the fraud is yours |
| Delivery platform | The platform | Often weekly, on their calendar | They deposit net of commission — the sales in your POS will never match the deposit |
| Gift cards and prepay | Whoever runs the programme | Money arrives before the meal is served | It is a liability, not revenue, until someone eats |
The rule that saves the bookkeeping: reconcile each channel to its own deposit, never to your total. Platform money that arrives net of commission looks like missing sales for exactly as long as nobody has explained it.
⏳ Holds, captures and the delivery problem
Remote orders often authorize one amount and settle another — a tip added later, an item substituted, a bar tab left open. Understand the two steps and most of the confusion disappears:
- Authorization reserves money on the customer's card. It shows up in their banking app as a pending charge, which is why people call to say they were charged twice when they were not.
- Capture is the real charge, for the final amount, when the order is complete.
- An authorization expires if you never capture it. Held funds on someone's card and no money for you is the worst of both, and it is usually a workflow that stops halfway.
- Adjusting the amount upward after authorization has limits. If an order grows a lot, take a fresh authorization rather than surprising the card.
Train whoever handles remote orders to know the difference. "Pending" is the single most common customer phone call in this whole course, and it takes fifteen seconds to answer correctly.
🛡️ Making remote payment safer and cheaper
- Use a hosted or embedded checkout from a reputable provider, so card data never touches your own systems. Cheaper, safer, and it shrinks your PCI paperwork — topic 5.
- Turn on address and security-code checks. Free, and they stop a meaningful share of stolen-card orders.
- Accept digital wallets. Apple Pay, Google Pay and the rest are authenticated by the customer's own device, which makes them among the safest remote payments you can take.
- Watch the classic pattern: an unusually large order, first time customer, delivery to a different address, in a hurry, paid with a card that was keyed rather than tapped. Any one of those is nothing. All of them together is a call worth making.
- Keep the phone-order path off paper. Enter the card straight into the terminal or the gateway while the customer is on the line. Nothing gets written down, ever.