The reason that we require credit card information to be directly entered into our secure portal is simply a matter of compliance and security.
While it may not seem so at first, providing payment information through a secure web portal is the safest method of providing payment information to any company. All payment information entered into our secure portal is tokenized so our staff never handles or is able to see any customer payment information.
A lot of payment information that is stolen and actually used for fraud is stolen by rogue employees who "create a copy" of information provided in phone calls. It is for this reason that are company's policies are designed to educate and protect our customers and only accept payment information via the secure portal. This results in your payment information being encrypted from the moment you into it our secure portal. Our staff never handles or is able to view your payment information and your payment information is not stored on our servers. Instead, we only receive a payment token from our payment processing provider that associated your account to your payment information stored securely in their systems.
We typically hear customers that have concerns about this policy being concerned about entering information in a secure web site and believe that it is not safe. Anyone with this concern should consider that with current technology design, around 999 out of every 1000 times you contact a company to supply payment information via phone, the person on the other end of the phone is simply entering that information into the same website. Therefore, calling in payment information does not prevent payment information from being transferred across the internet, it merely discloses your information to an unknown third party who transmits your payment information in the same manner anyway.
In summary, our policy is designed to safeguard and protect our customers' payment information. As long as you verify the URL in your address to ensure that you are in fact on our portal, entering payment information through a secure website is one of the safest ways to provide your payment information remotely.