Card-Present Transactions

In the payments industry, “retail” payments, where the customer is actually in front of you paying with his/her credit card, carry less risk compared to someone paying from an online store. Some merchant processors acknowledge this and give lower rates for such transactions. Authorize.Net for instance allows you to process eCommerce transactions and retail transactions in a single account. They call it a blended account, more info here.

Payment Center now supports blended Authorize.Net accounts. If you take credit card payments with a swiper, it will notify Authorize.Net that those transactions are card-present transactions, so you will get lower rates. Any other payments without a swiper will continue to be submitted as eCommerce transactions.

What do you need to do to implement this functionality?

Check with Authorize.Net to ensure you have a blended account.
Make sure that you are using the new payment page to take credit card payments, more info here: Pay Now. Note that the Pay Now button can also be attached to the invoice page.
Set up a swiper (if you don’t have one already, that is): Credit Card Swipe Capability
To make sure that swiped transactions are submitted as such, go to Payment Center Settings tab, under Payment Processors related list, click Authorize.Net. Check Enable Card-Present Transactions, as shown below (if you don’t see the field, please edit your layout and drag the field onto the page):
That should be it! Payments made from a swiper can de distinguished from the rest of the payments by a flag called Is Card Present:

Availability: Dec 2015 Release