Financialphobia or chrometophobia is the fear of dealing with money or personal finances.
This is a condition suffered by a surprising number of people around the world as they feel irrationally anxious, guilty or bored when thinking about money or dealing with their own personal finances.
This fear is often compounded with the thought of thrusting your bank details out into the internet ether, seemingly to be devoured by wolves.
To help put your mind at ease here is some information about what happens to your money when you make a purchase online: Your first encounter with purchasing online may well happen on an ecommerce website like Amazon.
If you don't know, Amazon started out selling books and now sells just about everything you can think of.
Create an Account The first stage of any online payment will be to make an account.
This is so that only you can access your orders and to provide a place where you can go to check on the progress of your order and for the website to hold your delivery address and order history.
This is just as safe as having an email account so should be nothing to worry about.
Actual Payment The next stage after you have selected what you want to buy is to actually make a payment.
All major retailers guarantee complete security when shopping online and ensure that all your bank details are either not kept at all, or kept on a secure server.
You should receive a receipt for your transaction which can be used just like if you made a payment in a high street store.
What Does Secure Mean? Secure means that all your information is encrypted.
Either in transit between the merchant and your bank, or where your details are stored on the merchants servers.
These tend to be vast banks of computers under lock and key with heavy digital security.
What happens to my details? Your details will be received by the online store, used to request a payment using a PDQ machine or equivalent, just like the card machines you use in almost every shop on your high street.
This transaction is performed by between the merchant (shop) and your bank or a payment service provider or by money transfer service.
This merchant processing uses your details to request the amount from the bank and will either have the money deposited directly into their business merchant account or will receive your payment along with all other payments for the day at night when the card machine processes all transactions and deposits the money in their account.
Hopefully this will have taken some of the mystery out of your online payment phobias...