Mail Order Telephone Order (MOTO) transactions: when to categorize transactions as MOTO

A mail order/telephone order (MOTO) transaction occurs when a customer makes a card payment over the phone or through mail order. MOTO transactions are exempt from Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirements. If your account is in the European Economic Area, Stripe will automatically mark payments with manually entered card details as MOTO.


A mail order/telephone order (MOTO) is a transaction initiated via mail order or over the phone.

If you accept card payments from your customers over the phone and process those payments through Stripe, those payments would be categorised as MOTO transactions, which fall outside the scope of Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirements.

Keyed-in transactions, which are card transactions where you key in the card number, expiry date, and security code to a card machine, are often used when you do not have access to the physical card. In those circumstances, these transactions might be MOTO transactions.

If your account is in the European Economic Area, payments made by manually entering card details in the Dashboard will be automatically marked as MOTO by Stripe.

If you need to process phone and mail payments via the API, contact our Support team to enable this feature on your Stripe account.

If you need to process keyed-in phone and mail payments transactions via Stripe Terminal, contact your Sales point of contact or speak directly to our Sales team. MOTO via Stripe Terminal requires the enablement of the paid P2PE feature.

Additional Information