Card-not-present
Also known as: CNP, Card-absent, Remote payment
A card-not-present transaction is one where the card or the cardholder is not physically at the merchant: online, by phone or with a saved card. Online payments the customer starts generally require strong customer authentication; phone orders and merchant-initiated payments are generally treated as outside it.
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Example
A customer pays a €45 invoice by typing card details into a web page. Nobody saw the card. That is card-not-present.
If the card and the customer are not both in front of you, or the card is a saved one, it is card-not-present.
Visa calls this environment card-absent. Its rules say it applies when the card and the cardholder are not physically present at the merchant, or when the transaction is not completed with an acceptance device, or when it uses a stored credential. So online, phone orders, invoices paid by card and subscriptions all land here.
Two details surprise people. Keying in the number with the customer standing there is still card-present under Visa's rules, so the line is not about the keypad. And a saved card used by a returning customer is a stored credential, which puts it on the card-absent side.
Why it matters. Fraud is harder to spot when nobody holds the card. In the EU, PSD2 requires strong customer authentication when a payer initiates an electronic payment, and for remote payments it requires the authentication to link dynamically to the amount and the payee (Article 97). In card terms, the protocol for this is EMV 3-D Secure, which EMVCo describes as a protocol that enables consumer authentication for card-not-present purchases. Mail and telephone orders are generally treated as outside strong customer authentication (PSD2 recital 95), as are later payments the merchant starts under an agreement the customer set up (EBA Q&A 2018_4031).
Chargebacks concentrate here. The merchant cannot show a chip read or a PIN. It has to show the order, the delivery and the customer's identity.
The usual mistake is to treat an online checkout as just another card payment. It is a different environment, with different evidence when a dispute arrives.
Know which side of the line each sale falls on. Your costs, your risk and your evidence all follow it. See also card-present.