Card Not Present (CNP)
Transactions where the physical card is not present at checkout (e-commerce, phone orders, and keyed-entry), which carry higher interchange rates due to elevated fraud risk.
Card-not-present (CNP) refers to any transaction where the cardholder's physical card cannot be verified at the point of sale. This includes all e-commerce purchases, MOTO (mail order/telephone order) transactions, and manually keyed card numbers.
Because the card cannot be physically verified, CNP transactions carry higher fraud risk than card-present transactions. Visa and Mastercard reflect this in their interchange tables: CNP interchange rates are typically 0.4–0.6% higher than equivalent card-present rates.
Fraud tools that are optional for card-present merchants (AVS, CVV2, 3D Secure) are either required or strongly recommended for CNP merchants to qualify for the best available interchange categories and reduce chargeback exposure.
E-commerce and MOTO merchants should have their fraud stack configured before they need it. A single fraud spike can push a merchant into Visa's or Mastercard's monitoring programs, which carry elevated fees and operational restrictions.
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