TL;DR:<\/strong><\/p>\n A card not present (CNP) transaction is any payment where the card isn\u2019t physically presented or electronically read at the point of sale. No chip insertion, no tap, no swipe. The merchant takes the card number and other details through another channel and submits them for authorisation without the card in hand.<\/p>\n This covers more of daily business than most owners realise:<\/p>\n Edge cases trip people up. A keyed-in card at a physical till, say when the chip fails, still counts as CNP. Refunds and pre-authorisations tied to an original CNP sale typically inherit the same treatment. Saved-card flows, where a client books once and pays automatically next time, are CNP even though the original card was present weeks earlier.<\/p>\n Not every CNP transaction carries the same risk, and acquirers price accordingly.<\/p>\n Three separate layers sit inside every CNP fee, and conflating them is the easiest way to misread a statement.<\/p>\n Interchange<\/strong> goes to the cardholder\u2019s bank and is the most heavily regulated component. For UK consumer cards it is capped at 0.2% (debit) and 0.3% (credit), so for most small businesses the acquirer\u2019s margin and other charges make up the bigger share of the total fee. Those caps don\u2019t touch scheme or acquirer margins, which is exactly why a capped interchange rate doesn\u2019t guarantee a cheap overall fee. Cross-border flows add another wrinkle. After Brexit, Visa and Mastercard raised interchange on online payments made with EEA-issued consumer cards at UK businesses from 0.2% to 1.15% (debit) and from 0.3% to 1.5% (credit). The Payment Systems Regulator concluded that a price cap is needed; in October 2025 it dropped plans for an interim cap in favour of a single long-term cap, and in January 2026 the High Court upheld its power to impose one. The cap level had not been set at the time of writing.<\/p>\n Scheme and processing fees<\/strong> are charged separately by Visa or Mastercard for running the network, and can include optional value-added services such as fraud scoring tools, so ask your provider which ones you are paying for.<\/p>\n Acquirer and service fees<\/strong> are where most of the variation between providers lives:<\/p>\n Request a summary box.<\/strong> PSR Specific Direction 14 requires card acquirers to give merchants with annual card turnover up to \u00a350 million a standardised summary box with their key prices and terms, including charges for different transaction types such as card-not-present payments and significant recurring fees. Asking for one is a legitimate, useful step before signing or renewing any processing contract.<\/p>\n Card-present (CP) transactions are often cheaper because chip and PIN or contactless verification lowers fraud risk, and acquirers price that in. For UK consumer cards, though, interchange is the same whether the card is present or not, so the gap comes mostly from how the payment is taken and where the card was issued.<\/p>\n Illustration only: on a typical UK pay-as-you-go plan, a \u00a3100 sale on a standard UK consumer card costs roughly \u00a31.50\u2013\u00a31.75 whether taken in person or online, but closer to \u00a32.50 when the card is keyed in by phone, and more on cards issued abroad. These figures show the shape of the gap, not a quote from any provider.<\/p>\n Every CNP payment follows the same basic path. The merchant captures card number, expiry, CVV and billing address, then sends an authorisation request to the acquirer, who routes it through the scheme to the issuing bank. The issuer approves or declines, and funds move during a later clearing and settlement batch.<\/p>\n Data quality affects both risk and cost at each step. Submitting the CVV and matching address data through AVS checks gives the acquirer stronger grounds to approve the transaction and lowers the merchant\u2019s exposure if a dispute follows. Keyed entry, where staff type in a number read aloud over the phone, skips some of these checks and tends to attract higher fees because the data trail is weaker.<\/p>\n Strong Customer Authentication (SCA), delivered through 3D Secure, sits at the authorisation step for most online card payments, asking the cardholder to confirm their identity before the issuer approves the transaction. Your payment provider can request an exemption for low-value or low-risk transactions, which removes the extra step; if the issuer accepts it, fraud liability usually stays with you (via your acquirer) instead of shifting to the card issuer.<\/p>\n In the EU\/EEA, card fraud was the second-largest payment fraud category by value in 2024 (EUR 1.3 billion, after EUR 2.5 billion for credit transfers), and about 83% of card fraud happened in remote, card-not-present payments, according to the 2025 EBA and ECB report on payment fraud. The same report shows transactions authenticated with SCA carry materially lower fraud rates than those without it, which is the clearest evidence available that the extra step at checkout earns its keep.<\/p>\n SCA-authenticated transactions show consistently lower fraud rates than non-authenticated ones<\/strong>, according to the EBA and ECB report, which also notes that exemptions remain widely used across the market. If your payment provider requests an exemption and the issuer accepts it, fraud liability usually stays with you (via your acquirer) instead of shifting to the card issuer, so it\u2019s a deliberate trade-off between smoother checkout and who absorbs the loss if something goes wrong, not simply a UX setting.<\/p>\n Common CNP fraud patterns worth watching for:<\/p>\n Keep dispute evidence on file, track chargeback rates against scheme thresholds, and review disputed transactions regularly to catch patterns before they become a compliance problem.<\/p>\n A few concrete moves make a measurable difference to both cost and exposure.<\/p>\n Pro Tip:<\/strong> Ask your acquirer for last quarter\u2019s chargeback-to-sales ratio in writing. If you don\u2019t know the number, you can\u2019t manage it.<\/em><\/p>\n Running payments through the same system as booking changes the risk profile. A deposit taken at the moment of booking, followed by an automated reminder before the appointment, cuts no-shows and gives you a clear record of what the client agreed to if a charge is later questioned.<\/p>\n Within Altegio<\/a>, payment policies, deposits taken at online booking and automated appointment reminders work alongside the schedule, so a client can book online and pay a deposit<\/a> in the same booking flow, through the payment provider you connect. Card guarantee mode<\/a>, which links the client\u2019s card instead of taking a deposit, runs on Adyen<\/a> and is currently available in EU countries only. See how online booking<\/a> and payment policies and no-show protection<\/a> work in Altegio, and our guide to reducing no-shows<\/a> for the tactics in more detail.<\/p>\n Most merchants chase the headline percentage and miss the bundle of monthly fees and chargeback charges sitting underneath it. Transparency is the lever that matters most: a summary box that breaks out interchange, scheme and acquirer costs is worth more than another quote on the blended rate.<\/p>\n The second priority is getting the SCA trade-off right rather than defaulting to exemptions everywhere, since that default quietly shifts fraud liability onto the business. An integrated booking and payment workflow helps with both, by giving you cleaner data at the point of sale and fewer manual, keyed-entry transactions to fund.<\/p>\n Appointment-driven businesses carry a specific flavour of CNP exposure: clients who book remotely, pay a deposit online, and sometimes don\u2019t show up. Reducing that exposure usually comes down to catching it at booking, not after the fact.<\/p>\n If you want to see how this fits your business, our pricing page<\/a> sets out subscription options, which depend on the number of team members and the billing period. Card processing fees are charged separately by the payment provider you connect.<\/p>\n A card not present transaction is any payment where the card isn\u2019t physically swiped, tapped or inserted at checkout. Ecommerce purchases, phone orders, mail orders and stored-card billing all fall into this category.<\/p>\n Card transaction fees combine interchange, scheme charges and acquirer margins, and the mix depends on whether the transaction is card-present or card-not-present. In the UK, interchange rules cap consumer debit interchange at 0.2% and consumer credit at 0.3% for UK domestic transactions (the EU\u2019s Regulation 2015\/751 sets the same caps within the EEA), though scheme and acquirer fees sit on top and aren\u2019t capped the same way.<\/p>\n A pending charge means the merchant has requested authorisation and the issuing bank has provisionally approved it, but the transaction hasn\u2019t yet moved through clearing and settlement. The final charge is confirmed once settlement completes, usually within a few days.<\/p>\n Altegio\u2019s subscription covers the software. Card processing is handled by the payment provider you connect, for example Stripe (or Adyen, where available), and that provider\u2019s processing fees apply under its own pricing, separately from your Altegio plan. Subscription pricing depends on the number of team members and the billing period; see the Altegio pricing page<\/a>.<\/p>\n Card-not-present payments can cost more mainly because fraud risk is greater without a physical card check, so acquirers charge more for keyed-in payments and add risk-based fees. Cross-border transactions can add a further layer, as the Payment Systems Regulator found with rising interchange on EEA-issued cards used at UK businesses.<\/p>\n General information, not financial or legal advice; check your contract and fees with your payment provider.<\/em><\/p>\n See when remote card payments cost more, how interchange, scheme, and acquirer charges shape the bill, and how appointment businesses can reduce exposure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":50408,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[232],"tags":[974,259,383,286],"class_list":["post-50435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finansy","tag-card-payments","tag-finance-ru","tag-fintech","tag-online-booking"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n
\nTable of Contents<\/h2>\n
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1. What counts as a card not present transaction<\/h2>\n
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2. How different CNP scenarios change your cost or fraud profile<\/h2>\n
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3. How card not present fees are built: interchange, scheme and acquirer charges<\/h2>\n
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4. Card present vs card not present: a worked cost comparison<\/h2>\n
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5. How a card not present transaction actually gets processed<\/h2>\n
![\"Card](\"https:\/\/alteg.io\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/card-not-present-fees-01.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n6. Fraud, chargebacks and the cost of strong customer authentication<\/h2>\n
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7. Practical steps to reduce card not present fees and risk<\/h2>\n
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8. How integrated booking and payments cut card not present exposure<\/h2>\n
9. What merchants should actually prioritise next<\/h2>\n
10. A simpler way to manage card not present risk<\/h2>\n
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FAQ<\/h2>\n
What is considered a card not present transaction?<\/h3>\n
What fees do businesses pay for card transactions?<\/h3>\n
What does it mean when a charge is pending on a credit card?<\/h3>\n
Does Altegio charge extra fees on payments processed through its platform?<\/h3>\n
Why are card-not-present fees usually higher than card-present fees?<\/h3>\n
Read next<\/h2>\n
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