Payment Gateways are the equivalent of the physical point of sale that you would normally see in a brick and mortar offline business. They provide encryption and security for transactions between the online retailer and the customer.

These gateways can be setup to automatically collect the credit card information and process the transaction live or you can use a shopping cart to collect all of the information and send it securely to you and then either manually process each transaction via an online virtual terminal or upload a group of transactions in a batch.

If you have both an online and offline business you can use your virtual terminal to process transactions from both locations.