Mobile Payment Processing: Take Cards on a Phone or Tablet

A payment taken on a phone travels the same path as any other card payment. Your phone or tablet only replaces the counter terminal.

1. Capture: the card details go in, typed, tapped, dipped or entered by the customer on a payment page.
2. Gateway: Authorize.Net sends them securely to be approved.
3. Merchant account: the acquiring bank's processor gets the approval from the card issuer and later deposits the money in your bank account.

How the card goes in matters more than the device. A card tapped or dipped in front of you is a card-present sale. A card typed into a screen, or entered by the customer on a payment link, is card-not-present. Card-not-present sales usually cost more and carry more chargeback risk, because nobody checked the card's chip. That one difference drives most of the cost and risk comparisons below.

Every mobile payment needs two things behind it: a payment gateway that sends the payment, and a merchant account that accepts it and pays you. Mobile merchant services are just those two set up for payments taken away from a counter.

Payment apps like Square, Stripe and PayPal bundle both for you. You sign up in minutes under their master account, and they review your business later. That's quick, but it's also why they can hold funds or close an account after you've started selling. With a merchant account, the bank approves your business before you take the first payment, and the Authorize.Net payment gateway connects your phone, website and virtual terminal to it. Our guide to getting an Authorize.Net merchant account explains the setup step by step.

Here are the options side by side, as Authorize.Net describes them on its own pages (checked September 27, 2026).

1. The virtual terminal in your phone's browser

The Authorize.Net virtual terminal is a web page, so it opens in a phone or tablet browser as well as on a computer. You log in, type the card number, expiry, card code and billing ZIP, and charge it. There's nothing to download and no reader to buy. It's a web page rather than a phone app, so it suits the occasional payment more than a line of customers. Every sale is keyed in and priced as card-not-present, even when the card is in your hand. See our Authorize.Net virtual terminal guide for keying payments safely.

2. Payment links, QR codes and invoices

Often the easiest mobile payment is one the customer makes on their own phone. Authorize.Net's Simple Checkout lets you "generate a shareable link for any product, service, or donation" or "create a scannable code for fast, contactless payment anywhere." The customer scans or taps, enters their card on a form Authorize.Net hosts, and pays. You never touch the card number. Authorize.Net says there's no setup fee, though "standard transaction fees apply." For amounts that change per job, Digital Invoicing sends a customer one link to pay by card, eCheck or other methods your account supports. Setup is covered in our guide to Authorize.Net Simple Checkout.

3. A checkout that works on phones

Many searches for "mobile commerce" really mean customers shopping on their phones. If you sell online, your checkout has to work on a small screen. Authorize.Net describes Accept Hosted as "a mobile-optimized payment form hosted by Authorize.net," which your website can open as a full page, a pop-up or an embedded frame. Most shopping carts handle this for you through their plugin. See shopping carts that work with Authorize.Net.

4. The Authorize.net 2.0 app with a card reader

For card-present sales on the go, Authorize.Net's newer "Authorize.net 2.0" app runs on iPhone and Android. Its support pages list the BBPOS Chipper 3X as the supported card reader, bought through its hardware partner. The older Augusta and Chipper 2X readers are no longer supported. Chip ("EMV") acceptance is the catch: Authorize.Net says it's "currently on First Data Nashville and TSYS platforms." If your merchant account runs on a different processor, a reader may not take chip cards through the app.

5. Tap to Pay on iPhone and Android

Tap to Pay turns a phone into a contactless reader: the customer taps their card, phone or watch on the back of yours. Authorize.Net's requirements, checked September 27, 2026:

• iPhone: "iPhone X (10) or later running iOS 18 or later," with the Authorize.net 2.0 mobile app.
• Android: a device running Android 13 with NFC, with the same app.
• Where: U.S. businesses only.
• Which processors: the pages don't agree. The iPhone page says "TSYS and FDN" in one place and "currently available only on the TSYS processing platform" in its FAQ. The Android page lists TSYS and FDN and calls FDN "coming next, very soon."

So confirm with your provider which processor your merchant account runs on before you plan around Tap to Pay.

Authorize.Net is a gateway that works with many processors, but its in-person features don't. Chip cards through the app, the Windows virtual point of sale (VPOS) app and Tap to Pay are all listed for specific processing platforms only. The browser, link, QR code and invoice options work with any supported merchant account.

Before you order hardware, ask your provider three questions:

1. Which processor does my merchant account run on?
2. Does Authorize.Net support chip cards and Tap to Pay on that processor today?
3. If not, what should I use for in-person sales instead?

Some businesses use a separate card terminal from their merchant account provider for in-person sales and keep Authorize.Net for online, phone and invoice payments. Developers building their own app should know that Authorize.Net's iOS and Android In-Person SDKs are deprecated and "may not be supported in the near future," while its Windows SDK is still fully supported.

Payment apps publish one flat rate per way of taking the card. Here are the published U.S. rates we checked on September 27, 2026 (PayPal's fee page was last updated September 1, 2026). They're the companies' own prices and can change.

Two things decide what you actually pay:

• How the card goes in. Keyed and link payments cost more than tapped or dipped cards at almost every provider, because the card networks charge more for card-not-present sales. If most of your mobile sales are face to face, a way to tap or dip the card is worth setting up.
• Your volume. A flat rate charges the same markup on every sale, however much you sell. As sales grow, a merchant account on interchange-plus pricing (the card networks' cost plus a fixed markup) usually costs less. Compare by effective rate: total monthly fees divided by card sales.

The full Authorize.Net fee list is in our Authorize.Net pricing and fees guide, and the Authorize.Net vs Stripe, PayPal and Square comparison works the math at three monthly volumes.

No. "Free" in mobile processing usually means one of three things:

• A free app or plan. Square's Free plan, for example, has no monthly fee, but every sale still pays the rates in the table above.
• A free or discounted reader. The hardware costs little or nothing; the processing fees are where the provider earns.
• "Zero-fee" or "free processing" programs. These pass the fee to your customer through a surcharge or a cash discount. Your cost drops, but your card customers pay more, and card network rules and some state laws limit how you can do it. For example, the card networks don't allow surcharges on debit cards. Check the rules for your state and card mix before signing up.

The honest question isn't "is it free?" but "what will I pay each month at my volume, and can the provider hold my money?" Get every fee in writing and work out your effective rate.

There's no single best option. It depends on how you sell. A quick guide:

A phone that takes payments is a payment device, so treat it like one:

• Lock the phone with a passcode or biometrics, and keep its software up to date.
• Give each person their own login with only the permissions they need, and remove access the day someone leaves.
• Never write card numbers down or take photos of cards. Key them straight in, or better, send a payment link.
• Collect the card code and billing ZIP on every keyed payment, and set up the Authorize.Net Fraud Detection Suite filters.

Authorize.Net says that with Tap to Pay on Android, "card data is never stored on the Android device." For the basics of the card industry's security rules, see PCI compliance for small businesses.

START has worked with Authorize.Net for more than 20 years and has set up over 60,000 Authorize.Net accounts. We set up the merchant account and the gateway together, and we'll tell you which mobile options work on your account before you buy anything.