Why Keyed and Online Card Sales Cost More

The rate gap in numbers

Visa's interchange table, effective April 18, 2026, lists separate rates for consumer credit cards used in person and online. Here are the retail card-present rates next to the general card-not-present rates:

On a $100 sale with a traditional rewards card, interchange is $1.75 in store and $2.14 online. If you move $20,000 a month of those sales from keyed entry to chip or tap, you save about $78 a month in interchange alone, before any processor markup on top of it.

Mastercard publishes its own table with a similar pattern. For how both networks set these rates, see what interchange fees are.

Why online and keyed sales cost more

When a customer inserts or taps a chip card, the terminal and the card exchange data that is very hard to counterfeit. When a card number is typed, whether by the customer online or by your staff at a terminal, none of that protection exists. Fraud losses on card-not-present sales are higher, and the card networks price that risk into interchange.

Card-present chip transactions also come with a liability rule that favors the merchant in many counterfeit-fraud cases, which is one more reason to use the chip reader whenever the card is in hand.

Keyed sales in a physical store

Typing a card number into your terminal, even with the customer at the counter, usually moves the sale out of the card-present category. Staff often key cards when a chip reader is slow or a card is worn. Those habits add up.

• Keep terminals and readers updated and clean so chip and tap work the first time.
• Train staff to try tap, then chip, and to key a card only as a last resort.
• If you key cards often for phone orders, use a virtual terminal that collects the billing address and security code.

How to qualify for the best online rates

Online sales will always cost more than chip and tap, but some online sales cost more than others. To keep yours in the best available category:

1. Send address verification data. Ask for the billing ZIP code at least, and the full billing address where you can.
2. Collect the card security code on every new card.
3. Use your processor's tokenization for saved cards. Visa's 2026 table includes small reductions, from 0.05% to 0.15%, for qualifying online sales that use network tokens or Visa's authentication data program.
4. Settle your batch every day. Late settlement can push sales into higher categories.
5. Send a payment link instead of taking card numbers over the phone. The customer enters their own details on a secure page, which captures the full data set.

Recurring billing

If you bill customers on a schedule, such as monthly memberships or service plans, make sure your processor flags those charges as recurring. Visa's recurring categories for a traditional rewards card run from 1.33% to 1.53% plus 5 cents, below the general online rate of 2.04% plus 10 cents. Charges that are recurring in practice but not flagged as recurring miss those rates.

Measure how often your staff key cards

Most processors and point-of-sale systems can report how each sale was entered: chip, tap, swipe, keyed, or online. Run that report for the last three months and work out what share of your in-store volume was keyed.

For a business where nearly every customer pays in person, keyed sales should be a small fraction of the total. If the share is high, look for a pattern. One register with a failing reader, one shift, or one employee often accounts for most of it, and the fix may be a new reader or a five-minute training session. Check the report again a month later to confirm the share came down.

Where card-not-present costs show up on your statement

On interchange-plus pricing, look for category names that mention card not present, CNP, e-commerce, or key entry. On tiered pricing, these sales usually land in the mid-qualified or non-qualified tiers, which our guide to non-qualified downgrades covers. Either way, the share of your volume in these categories is one of the biggest drivers of your effective rate.