Cookie Policy

This site uses cookies – small text files that are placed on your machine to help the site provide a better user experience.

In general, cookies are used to retain user preferences, store information for things like shopping baskets, and provide anonymised tracking data to third party applications like Google Analytics.

As a rule, cookies will make your browsing experience better. However, you may prefer to disable cookies on this site and on others. The most effective way to do this is to disable cookies in your browser. We suggest consulting the Help section of your browser or taking a look at the About Cookies website which offers guidance for all modern browsers

Here is a list of cookies that we use.  We’ve listed them here so you can choose if you want to opt-out of cookies or not.  Choosing to disable cookies may hinder your use of certain functions.

We use cookies for the following purposes:

These cookies are required for you to be able to use some important features on our website, such as logging in. These cookies don’t collect any personal information.

CloudFlare

We use a thirdparty solution called CloudFlare to improve the performance of the website and to add additional security to it.

  • __cfduid – This cookie is necessary for Cloudflare’s security features . The cookie does not contain sensitive data.

Cookie Acceptance

When you acknowledge our cookie warning message we create the following cookie:

  • catAccCookies – This contains no personal data but is used to ensure that we don’t keep showing you the same Cookie message.  This cookie expires after 1 year.

These cookies provide functionality that makes using our service more convenient and makes providing more personalised features possible. For example, they might remember your name and e-mail in comment forms so you don’t have to re-enter this information next time when commenting.

Comments and Reviews

When you leave a comment or review of an item on our website the following
cookies are created:

  • comment_author_{HASH}
  • comment_author_email_{HASH}
  • comment_author_url_{HASH}

This is purely a convenience, so that the visitor won’t need to re-type all their information again when they want to leave another comment. These cookies are set to expire a little under one year from the time they’re set.

Shop

To keep track of your shopping basket we use of 3 cookies:

  • woocommerce_cart_hash
  • woocommerce_items_in_cart
  • wp_woocommerce_session_

The first two cookies contain information about the basket as a whole and helps us know when the content changes. The final cookie contains a unique code for each customer so that it knows where to find the basket data in the database for each customer. No personal information is stored within these cookies.

These cookies are used to track the use and performance of our website and services

Google Analytics

To provide us with information about numbers of visitors to our website, which pages they visit and the sorts of devices they are using we use the Google Analytics service. This creates  the following cookies:

  • _ga – expires after 2 years and is used to distinguish users.
  • _gid – expires after 24 hours and is used to distinguish users.
  • _gat – expires after 1 minute and is used to throttle request rate.
  • _gac_{property-id} – expires after 90 days and contains campaign related information for the user. If you have linked your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, AdWords website conversion tags will read this cookie unless you opt-out.

Google has their own Privacy Policy which you can review here. If you’d like to opt out of tracking by Google Analytics, visit the Google Analytics opt-out page.