When building eCommerce sites or working with payment gateways, you might come across the term "Virtual Terminal". You know how when you go into a brick-and-mortar store and pay with debit/credit card, the merchant will swipe your card in the "credit card swipe machine" to authorize and charge your card. This machine is also known as the "point-of-sale" (POS) terminal. Well, "Virtual Terminal" is the online equivalent of that machine and consists of a password protected secured web page, or web application.
If you are a merchant and do not have a brick and mortar phyiscal store and a customer calls in to place an order over the phone, what do you do? If you have virtual terminal, you would ask the customer to tell you the credit card number over the phone. And on your end, you would type in that credit card number into a secured web application hosted by your payment processor. This web application is the "virtual terminal".
This not only works for phone orders, but works for email orders, fax orders, and postal mail orders where customer send you their credit card number via these methods.
Having virtual terminal usually incurs an monthly fee. Paypal's Website Payment Pro product includes virtual terminal. If you have PayPal's Website Payment Standard, you can add on virtual terminal for an additional monthly fee. See Paypal comparison of the two products. Or you can just purchase PayPal's Virtual Terminal product.
Similarly, other payment gateways such as Authorize.net also have Virtual Terminal product.
Banks (such as Bank of America and Wells Fargo) who offer merchant accounts will sometime offer virtual terminal as well.
