Card-not-present volume is not one product. A hotel taking a deposit over the phone and a dental practice taking a card for a treatment plan look identical to a gateway and completely different to an underwriter. We've documented six of them well enough to say which ones we can place and which ones we stop at.
Reservations, deposits, no-shows and corporate invoicing. Ticket sizes are wide, booking windows are long, and chargebacks cluster around cancellation policy disputes — which means the file lives or dies on how clearly the cancellation terms are written, not on the volume.
Treatment plans, insurance gaps, and payment arrangements taken by phone. Predictable, high-trust, low chargeback. The friction is documentation, not risk.
Deposits, parts, and wholesale invoices. Larger tickets, longer delivery windows, and a disproportionate share of disputes from delivery timing. We require delivery proof before the first month is up.
Businesses that already take cards but route the exceptions — phone orders, back-orders, B2B accounts — through a channel that will actually approve them.
Net-30 customers paying by card, often large tickets. Slowest to approve, cleanest once running, because the paper trail is usually already there.
Highest chargeback exposure of the six. We take these files only with a reserve, a delivery-proof process, and a volume cap in the first quarter.
Anything where the customer cannot describe how the order arrives and how it is delivered. That's not a moral position — it's the single best predictor of a file that dies in month three.
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