Of everything we have ever put on our YouTube channel, one video gets watched more than all the others combined: our full walkthrough of the Swipe Simple virtual terminal. Thousands of business owners have sat through all 22 minutes of it, which tells us two things. Owners want to see the tool before they commit, and nobody else is showing it to them.
So here it is, with a written guide to go with it. Below the video you will find the 8 features our clients use most, in the order they appear in the tutorial, plus a word from a client who runs his whole nationwide business on a virtual terminal.
Swipe Simple Virtual Terminal, the full tutorial. Chapters are in the video description if you want to jump around.
First, what is a virtual terminal?
A virtual terminal is a secure web page where you take payments without a card machine. You log in from any computer, phone or tablet, type in the card or pull up a saved customer, and the money lands in your account the same as a swipe. It is built for anyone who gets paid over the phone, by email, by invoice or by mail: medical offices, law firms, contractors, distributors, caterers, and anyone who ships product.
Swipe Simple is the one we recommend most often. It is simple enough that your front desk learns it in an afternoon, and it syncs across every device, so the owner can see the whole business from one screen.
The 8 features our clients use most
1. The dashboard that shows your whole business at a glance
The home screen (0:00 in the video) shows total transactions, successful transactions and your average ticket for whatever window you choose: today, this month or last month. Color coding shows you which transactions went through, which were refunded and which were declined. If you have a countertop terminal and a virtual terminal, both feed the same numbers.
2. Transactions you can sort, search and export
At 3:28 the tutorial moves into the transaction list. Every sale shows the cardholder name, card type, transaction type and method. You can sort by date, pull up any receipt, issue a refund, and export the whole list to a spreadsheet for your bookkeeper. No more waiting on a monthly statement to find out what happened.
3. A customer list that remembers cards for you
Customer management (4:34) is where repeat business lives. Store a customer once, and the next charge takes about ten seconds. You can import your existing customer list from a spreadsheet using the template Swipe Simple provides, so switching does not mean retyping years of records.
4. An item catalog with inventory, categories and discounts
The item catalog (5:20) lets you load products or services with a name, SKU, price and tax rate, either one at a time or by uploading a file. You can group items into categories, track how many you have on hand, and build discounts as either a percentage or a dollar amount. Birthday discount, weekend special, cash price, whatever fits your business.
5. Reporting that answers the questions owners actually ask
The reports section (7:49) breaks sales down by day, by item, by tax rate and by customer. You can see which items sell best, who your top customers are, and which stored cards are about to expire so you can give those clients a heads up before a payment fails.
6. The virtual terminal itself
At 9:43 the video gets to the part most people came for. A new transaction defaults to card, with cash recording available too. Pick a stored customer or type in a new one, enter the amount, add a note, and charge. The tutorial runs a live test transaction so you can see exactly what your staff will see.
Right next to it are scheduled payments. Set up a monthly subscription or split a large bill into installments, and Swipe Simple charges the card on schedule without anyone touching it. For practices with payment plans, this feature alone pays for itself.
7. Invoices by email
Invoicing (13:35) lets you build an invoice with the customer's name, email and phone, add items from your catalog, and send it. The customer clicks and pays. You can set your logo and colors so the invoice looks like it came from you, not from a software company.
8. Payment links you can send anywhere
Payment links (14:40) are the feature that surprises most owners. Create a link for a specific service, add a custom message at the top, and send it by text or email, or drop it on your website. The tutorial builds one for a 100 dollar office visit as the example. When the customer opens it, they see a clean payment page with your branding, enter their card, and you are paid.
The last few minutes of the video cover the settings that make this feel like your system: logo and colors on receipts, daily batch reports by email, and alerts that ping your office manager when a payment link gets paid or an item runs low.
What a client says about running on a virtual terminal
Howard Rudin is the president of Power Lines Incorporated and the Ace Belting Company, an industrial supplier of conveyor belting to manufacturers. His customers are all over the country and all over the world, and they pay him in every way imaginable. Here is Howard in his own words.
"What brought me to The Merchant Way? Responsiveness. Simple little things like picking up the phone and answering my call. I had a previous supplier who, for whatever reason, could not give me exactly what I wanted. The Merchant Way and Tom Coughlin were responsive, quick to answer my questions, and to get me exactly what I needed. Oh, and did I tell you that they lowered my cost? Who doesn't like putting some money back in their pocket? Having a reliable, easy to use virtual gateway to process virtual checks and credit card charges from all over the country and all over the globe is really a game changer for me. The Merchant Way is absolutely providing those solutions for us."
Notice what Howard leads with. Not the software. The phone getting answered. The tool matters, but the people behind it matter more, and that is the part most big processors cannot offer.
What Swipe Simple costs with us
Here is the part the big processors do not like to talk about. The virtual terminal is only as good as the rates behind it. Plenty of owners pay a fair software fee and then lose far more to junk fees buried in their monthly statement: PCI non-compliance charges, batch fees, statement fees and a markup on every card type.
With The Merchant Way, Swipe Simple runs on transparent interchange-plus pricing, so you see exactly what the card networks charge and exactly what we add. If you would rather pass the cost of card acceptance to the customer, our cash discount program works with the same tools. Agreements are month to month with no early termination fees, and you get a dedicated account manager who picks up the phone, which is exactly what brought Howard over.
If you want to see what Swipe Simple would look like on your statement, request a free rate analysis. Send us a recent statement and we will show you, line by line, what you would pay with us and what you would keep. Most owners are surprised by the number.
And if you want more walkthroughs like this one, our YouTube channel has short tutorials on Clover cash discount setup and customizing receipts in Authorize.Net, plus more client stories.