Cookie Policy
This cookie policy is designed to inform you about what cookies are, how we use them, and how you can manage them if you choose to. We're giving you this information as part of our initiative to comply with the new recent legislation on how cookies should be used.
What are Cookies
Cookies are small text files held on your computer. They allow us to give you the best browsing experience possible and mean we can understand how you use our site. Some cookies have already been set. You can delete and block cookies but parts of our site won't work without them. By using our website you accept our use of cookies.
Cookies we Use
Strictly necessary
These cookies are essential in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the website. Without these cookies services you have asked for, like shopping baskets or e-billing, cannot be provided. These are all the cookies without which the website could not perform basic functions. They may be set automatically when pages load, or as a result of a user request that cannot be fulfilled without the use of the cookie. Generally these are session cookies that expire on closing the browser but not always.
Analytical/performance
These cookies are used to provide site owners with statistical information about their site – which is generally used for performance measurement and improvement. This is generally also known as ‘Analytics’. It includes activities like counting page visits, dwell time, bounce rates, technologies used to access the site, and page load speeds.
Generally these will be first party cookies, and a mix of session and persistent cookies. Sometimes the services are provided by third parties and specialised software – which can use either first or third party cookies.
Some third party software services embedded in a site may use analytics software services to measure the performance of their services. In such cases we would classify these cookies as appropriate to the services or functionality provided by the third party, rather than automatically list them as Performance Cookies. This is because they are used by the third party, rather than by the site the visitor is accessing, and therefore the data they collect can be put to purposes unknown by the site owner, especially if used in combination with other cookies set by the third party.
These cookies collect information about how visitors use a website, for instance which pages visitors go to most often, and they let you store items in your shopping basket between visits. They may also show us which email or web page visitors clicked through from in order to visit our website, and whether you opened an email we sent you.
Some of these are analytics cookies, set using third party web analytics software, which allow us to monitor our website traffic. For example, we use Google Analytics cookies to help us do this. These analytics cookies may also tell us how many of our visitors are male or female, and may summarise the number of visitors who fall within certain age ranges, or certain interest categories. However, this sort of information is not linked to any individual; it just shows us what percentage of our visitors fall in particular categories.
We will not pass this data to third parties in such a way that would allow them to identify visitors personally. However, we may associate this cookie data with other personally identifiable data submitted by you (for instance when you submit a form, or partially complete a form, or leave items in your shopping basket), in order to make sure that our communications are as relevant to you as possible.
Sometimes we may use this data to highlight our products or services which we think will be of interest to you based on your use of our website, or to contact you and offer help if you appear to be having difficulty completing an order.
We may also use third party cookies during e-commerce transactions to help prevent fraud.
Functionality
These cookies are generally there to support site functionality that is visible or advantageous to the user or their experience of the site. This includes elements of persistent personalisation (remembered on subsequent visits), and enhanced functionality like web chat services, surveys, commenting and rating systems, and user preferences. They are generally a mix of first and third party, session and persistent cookies. These cookies store information regarding user consent on loading. This consent is requested on the first time the user loads a page which uses a relevant feature. It is then stored for reference during future visits to the website.
Social Sharing Cookies as Functionality Cookies: Buttons and widgets provided by social network services and other third parties commonly set cookies which enable visitors to post links to, ‘Like’ or comment on a site through their social networks.
Advertising & Targeting
The information the cookies gather on you can be shared with other advertisers to measure the performance of their advertisements. Additionally, another purpose of targeting and advertising cookies is to build user profiles from visitors to the website to gather statistics on the performance of the advertisements that can carry across many websites. These cookies are almost always third party, persistent cookies. This means that the cookies can follow the user as they visit other websites. Sometimes, the site with the advertising cookies do not display the advertisements but it can target users with advertisements elsewhere even after they’ve left the site. Examples of targeting and advertising cookies include social media cookies that are placed on sites to track users around the web to provide ads to them on social media platforms.
The following links explain how to access cookie settings in various browsers:
You have a number of options when it comes to receiving cookies. You can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only ‘trusted’ sites to send them, or to accept only those cookies from websites you are currently using.We recommend that you don’t block all cookies because parts of our website rely on them to work properly.
To opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics across all websites, visit this link: http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.