Cookie Policy
What are Cookies
Cookies are small, often encrypted text files, used by web developers to help users navigate their websites efficiently and perform certain functions.
The problem with cookies is both one of privacy - what is being registered? - and one of transparency - who is tracking you, for what purpose, where does the data go, and for how long does it stay?
Why do we use cookies
Cookies are widely used in order to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site, such as the number of visitors. They also help us to:
- Make our website work as you'd expect
- Save you having to login every time you visit the site
- Improve the speed/security of the site
- Continuously improve our website for you
- Make our marketing more efficient (ultimately helping us to offer the service we do at the price we do)
We do not use cookies to:
- Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
- Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
- Pass data to advertising networks
- Pass personally identifiable data to third parties
- Pay sales commissions
You can learn more about all the cookies we use below.
Types of Cookies
Essential and non-essential cookies?
Essential cookies are cookies that are likely to be deemed essential are those used for the shopping basket and checkout, those that provide security for online banking services and those that help ensure that your page loads quickly by distributing the workload.
Non-essential cookies are any cookies used for analytical purposes to count the number of visitors to a website, any cookies used by first party or third-party advertisers, including affiliates, and cookies used to recognise the user when they return to a website, so they receive a tailored greeting or optimised landing page.
Session and persistent cookies?
Web pages have no memories. A user going from page to page will be treated by the website as a completely new visitor. Session cookies enable the website you are visiting to keep track of your movement from page to page, so you don't get asked for the same information you've already given to the site.
Persistent cookies- these remain on your hard drive until you erase them, or they expire. How long a cookie remains on your browser depends on how long the visited website has programmed the cookie to last. Persistent cookies help websites remember your information and settings when you visit them in the future. Other website features made possible by persistent cookies include: language selection, theme selection, menu preferences, internal site bookmarks or favourites, among many others.
First and third-party cookies?
Cookies can be set by the website you have browsed, i.e. the website displayed in the uniform resource locator (URL) window. These are called first party cookies. Third party cookies are set by a website other than the one you are browsing. Advertising networks are the most common begetters of third-party cookies; they use them to track a user across multiple websites, activity which they can then use to tailor their ads.
Cookies used on our website
Statistics
Marketing
Granting us permission to use cookies
If the settings on your software that you are using to view this website (your browser) are adjusted to accept cookies we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you are fine with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.
Turning Cookies Off
You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies (Learn how here). Doing so however will likely limit the functionality of our's and a large proportion of the world's websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites
It may be that you concerns around cookies relate to so called "spyware". Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive. Learn more about managing cookies with antispyware software.
