Cookie Policy

What are Cookies?

Cookies are small pieces of text that a website can ask your browser to remember. Once we have asked your browser to remember this information, it passes the text back to our server every time you access a page on our website. Cookies are the industry standard way to allow a website to identify that different web pages are being accessed by the same user. Without them you could login to our site, or put an item in the basket, but as soon as you moved to another page on our site, our website would see you as a new user and your login status or basket contents would be lost. There are alternatives but they are much less robust, more complex and less secure.

Types Of Cookies

There are two main types of cookies, Session & Permanent, explained below.

• Session Cookies
  These cookies only last as long as your browser is open. Browsers only store these temporarily (usually in memory) and are lost as soon as your browser is closed. These are generally used for things such as your login status as it allows the website to keep you logged in while you browse the website, but you are effectively logged out automatically when you close your browser. (Please note it's always good practice to log out of websites regardless, especially banking sites or on shared computers)
• Permanent Cookies
  These cookies are set to expire at a certain time that could be months or years away. Your browser will usually write these to a file or database on your computer. Please note that it is your browser that does this, at no point does the website has the ability to write information to your hard drive. All browsers are also very careful about making sure the content being written is not malicious. These can be used for instance to allow you to add items to your shopping basket and have them still there when you visit the website in the near future.

Cookies Used On Our Website

We use the following cookies on our website. These are purely used to provide a secure, simple way to allow our website to function correctly and to provide basic anonymous statistics on how our website is used.

• PHPSESSID
  This is a session cookie that allows us to identify whether you are logged in or not, and to keep track of the contents of your shopping basket. Without this cookie, our website will not function correctly.
• PIWIK_* & _pk_* Cookies
  These cookies are a mix of session & permanent cookies that are used to provide us basic anonymous statistics on how customers find our website and how our website is used.
• civicAllowCookies
  This is set by the software that shows the cookie notification in the bottom left hand corner of the page. It makes sure the notification window only pops up the first time you open our website rather than on every page.