Our Commitment To Privacy
Your privacy is important to us. On our ecommerce server we only have the information that you provide for making orders, i.e. name, address and contact information. This limited set of information and your orders are available for you to view and update from the 'account dashboard' should you become a registered user.
Additionally we have a limited set of this information passed to our back office for the purpose of accounting.
Importantly we do not keep credit card numbers on the system. Should you make a purchase with a credit card this information will be passed to a third party gateway with only the result of that transaction being 'known as successful or declined' by our server. We do recommend using credit rather than debit cards online, not just here but everywhere online as credit card purchases in the UK are insured against theft/loss.
For the purposes of improving the performance of our website we use 'Google Analytics' for tracking site visitors. From this information we are not able to track individual site visitors including you - we just have a look at the aggregated statistics. This information is not collected per se.
The use of cookies on this site
It is the same stories with 'cookies' - on your computer we store a 'cookie', this is standard practice on ecommerce websites, the 'cookie' identifies your computer to our server and enables you to have a smoother shopping experience. We do not use these to explicitly track you or keep information on you.
During a purchase you may provide additional data that is personal, if buying a gift certificate or adding a gift message. Any personal information entered here stays online with your order but is not used by us for any purpose other than what you intended.
This site uses a 'persistent basket' that enables you to add items, log out and log in again, with the 'basket' still having items in there that you added earlier. We do advise you to use this feature, log out if you are interrupted from completing a purchase and log in again when you are ready: this will help your online privacy with us.
Sales & Promotions
We do run a limited amount of newsletters and sales promotions. This is from a seperate mailing programme that from time to time can end up with surplus entries, i.e. old email addresses and email addresses from customers that no longer wish to receive product information. If you are receiving emails from us in error please follow the information provided on the mailout to get yourself removed from our system. If, for some reason, we continue to send you unwanted mailouts, then please contact us and let us know - we do try to keep our systems working properly and need to know if our unsubscribe options are not working properly.
General
In order to help our suppliers better understand the marketplace we share some internet statistics with them. None of this information has any personal information, just aggregated statistics - 'site hits' and 'sales'. We do not share email details with our suppliers.
We have followed best practice in building online systems that are secure. Should your information be obtained by unauthorised access - 'hacking' - we will inform you of this as soon as we identify a problem. As mentioned, your credit card details will not be on the system, or have ever been, so you can shop with confidence here.
As per the Data Protection Act we can provide you with full details that we may have on you online and on our back office system. See our contacts page for how to contact us to make a formal request. Also, if you have any questions regarding privacy, please do not hesitate to ask.
