Privacy & Cookies Policy

On this page you'll find the details of our:

• Privacy Policy
• Cookies Policy

Privacy Policy

Who are we?

Who are we? 

We are Great British Brands USA, a family-owned online gift business.  The details of the Privacy Policy which follows relates to our website. 

At Great British Brands USA we are committed to protecting your privacy and to gaining and maintaining the confidence and trust of all visitors to our website. We will only use the information that we collect about you lawfully in accordance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).  In this Privacy Policy we’ve provided detailed information on when and why we collect your personal information. We explain how we use it, what third-party service providers we might share your information with and under what circumstances, and how we keep it secure.
If there are any questions regarding this Privacy Policy you may contact us using the information below:

Great British Brands USA
Registered Office: Unit 2E,
Woodlands Farm,
The Vale, Chesham,
Bucks,
HP5 3NJ

Email  [email protected]

Phone: 646 980 1763 (4.00am - 12.00pm EST, Monday - Saturday)

 

If for any reason you are unsure about any of the personal and account information we are holding in your name, please contact us using the contact details listed above. We will update your private records if required.

It’s likely that we’ll need to review this Privacy Notice from time to time. We’ll notify you of any significant changes.

At a glance - why do we collect information from you?

We collect information about you for the following reasons:

• to process your order
• to help you check out in a quick, user-friendly way when you have an account with us
• to provide you with the best possible service, including a personalised browsing experience, tailored to your preferences.
• to improve our website based on analysis of sales data
• to provide you with marketing newsletters (if you signed up to our mailing list)
• to offer personalised advertising after you leave our website

What personal data do we collect?

When you place an order with us, the information we will collect includes:

• Full name,
• IP Address,
• billing and delivery address,
• telephone number,
• A record of your order
• e-mail address
• credit/debit card details (all sensitive details are inaccessible even to us from moment of purchase and are securely encrypted)

This information is necessary for us to process your payment and deliver your order to you.

 

When you create an account with us, we will collect the following information:

• Full Name
• e-mail address
• Telephone number
• Billing and Shipping addresses
• A record of your orders
• Your newsletter subscription status
• A list of products you added to your “wish list”
• Your debit or credit card details are sent securely to Opayo or Mollie, industry-leading Payment Gateway Providers, - we have no access to them)

You don’t have to have an account with us to place orders on our websites, but many returning customers find it helpful to have one.

Having an account with us will allow you to place an order quickly, without the need to re-enter all your details every time you checkout with us.

You can quickly and easily log into your account and change or edit any of your personal data by clicking on “My Account” either in the header or the footer of our website.

If you’d like to delete your account please contact our Customer Service who will remove your account together with all personal information it contains.  

The legal basis for collecting your data when you set up an account is based on your consent.

 

When you visit our website, we also might collect the following information:

• IP address
• Information regarding what pages are accessed and when.
• Information related to the device used, such as web browser type, operating system and device type.
• Demographic information
• General product preferences and interests based on your browsing history on our website

We gather this information to analyse our site’s performance and look for areas for improvement. This data also allows us to give you customised product recommendations based on best-sellers and product views.

 

If you wish to sign-up to our mailing list, we will collect the following information:

• Name
• Email address

We will never send you marketing emails without your consent. To read more about our newsletter policy, please click here to be moved lower down the page.

 

If you contact our Customer Service Team:

If you contact our customer service team in relation to your order, we will:

• take a note of the conversation with you,
• Note the date and nature of your query or complaint
• We’ll also include a note of what we did to help.

If you contact our customer service team with a query unrelated to a previous order, we might ask for your name and contact details to be able to get in touch with you and we will keep this data until no longer than necessary to help with your query.

We will never collect any sensitive information about you without your explicit consent. 

 

Supplier Enquires

If you contact us at our Customer Service email with supplier queries, your email will be forwarded to the relevant department and you might be contacted back using contact details you provided us with.

 

Recruitment

Occasionally we advertise jobs in our shops or other departments on our Careers page. When you send your CV to an email address indicated in the advert, your personal data will be processed by our HR team and your contact details will be used to contact you.

The legal bases we rely on to collect information

Data Protection laws set out several different reasons for which a company may collect and process your personal data. These are:

Consent

In certain circumstances, we will only process your personal data with your clear consent.

For example, we will add you to our mailing list only if you sign up though a pop-up box or tick a relevant box at the checkout. You can create an account on our website only if you wish to do so. Not having an account doesn’t prevent you from placing an order with us

Contract

When placing an order with us, we will require certain personal data like your name and address to be able to deliver your order so that we comply with our obligations under the sale contract. These details will be then passed on to our carrier company to deliver the goods to you.

We will use your e-mail address to provide you with updates regarding your order, such as order confirmation, despatch & tracking information.

We will also collect your phone number to be able to contact you in case of any problems with your order.

Depending on which delivery option you choose, your phone number and/or e-mail address might be passed on to our carrier so that they can keep you updated when your goods will be delivered (whenever applicable).

Legal compliance

If the law requires us to, we may need to collect and process your data if fraud or other financial crime is suspected.  

Legitimate interest

In certain situations, we will use your data to pursue our legitimate interests in a way which might reasonably be expected as part of running an e-commerce business. We will process personal data for the following legitimate interests:

• where the processing of our customers’ browsing and purchasing history enables us to enhance, modify, personalise or otherwise improve our services and communications for the benefit of our customers.
• to identify and prevent fraud and keep our services safe and secure
• to better understand how people interact with our website
• to improve our product selection and service based on your post-purchase feedback
• to notify you within 24 hours if you left items in your basket

For example:

We will use your purchase history to tailor our products recommendations to best suit your interests both on our website and occasionally in our newsletters (but only if you’ve signed up to our mailing list).

We will combine your browsing and purchasing data with all other customers’ data to analyse and identify shopping trends and areas for our improvement.

A short time after you’ve purchased a gift from us, we will send you a request to review your shopping experience with us as well as products you’ve purchased to help other customers make more informed choices when shopping with us.

Who has access to your information?

Your personal data security is our priority. We will not sell trade or transfer your personal information to any third parties under any circumstances. We will not share your information with third parties for marketing purposes.

This does not include trusted third party Service Providers who assist us in operating our website, conducting our business, or providing services to you on our behalf.

For example: We use Mailchimp as our email marketing platform to enable us to send out marketing emails and we use different carrier companies to deliver your goods to you.

Such trusted parties may have access to personally identifiable information on a need-to-know basis and we disclose only the personal information that is necessary to deliver the service. All third party service providers are contractually obliged to keep your information confidential.  All of our partners have confirmed they comply with all appropriate data protection laws.

What data we might share with third party service providers?

In order to be able to fulfil your order, and provide you with the best possible service, we may need to share your personal data with third party service providers for the following reasons:

• In order to process your payment securely, and to check for potential fraud your personal data will be shared with our payment providers.
• In order to deliver your order we will share your delivery address and may share your email and telephone number with our carrier so that you can be notified when your order is on its way.
• In order to serve you with tailored product recommendations and personalised website and newsletter content your browsing & purchasing history is shared with Episerver, our third-party personalization platform.
• In order to give you the opportunity to review the quality of our service and products your email and order details (products you ordered) will be shared with Reviews.co.uk to request your feedback. Feedback is optional and can also be given anonymously.
• Only if you have consented, will you be subscribed to our email newsletter which will keep you updated regarding special offers, new products and other marketing information. You can unsubscribe at any time.
• In order to advertise online we use something called “remarketing” which uses data from your past visits to our website to show you personalised adverts featuring products you have looked at on our site. We work with Google and Facebook to show our ads in this way.
• In order to measure the effectiveness of our paid advertising, we use Google products such as Adwords but this does not provide us with any personally identifiable data.

Keeping in touch through email marketing

We operate our newsletter on a strict opt-in basis. We will not contact you for marketing purposes by email (or any other means) unless you have given your prior consent. You have a choice about whether or not you wish to receive information from us.

You can sign up to our newsletter either by filling out a form when you see a pop-up on our website or by ticking a box at the checkout, when you’re making a purchase.

We use a double opt-in sign-up system, which means that after signing up to our newsletter you’ll receive a confirmation email asking you to confirm subscription. This allows us to prevent unwanted or spam subscriptions.

We use a specialist email advertising company called MailChimp, to send out our newsletter. We gather statistics regarding email opening and clicks using industry standard technologies to help us monitor and improve our e-newsletter. If you require more information, please see MailChimp’s privacy notice.

Our third-party partner Episerver, allows us to occasionally provide you with personalised content in our newsletter, based on your previous website visits. We do this on the basis of legitimate interest to provide you with product suggestions most relevant to you.

We will not e-mail you in the future if you do not want us to do so. You can unsubscribe from our mailing list at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any of our emails. You can also email us with your request at [email protected]

Abandoned Cart Emails

If during the course of browsing our website you place products in your basket and provide us with your e-mail address but for some reason leave before you completed your purchase, we might send you an email notification just to check that nothing went wrong.  These emails are sent only once and are fully automated. If you receive such email from us, but don’t find them helpful and wish not to receive them in the future, simply click the “unsubscribe” button in the footer of the email or contact us by phone or e-mail.

Feedback Requests

It is our legitimate interest to learn whether you enjoyed using our website and what you think about the products you’ve purchased. Sometime after you’ve received your order we will contact you through our third party service provider Reviews.co.uk to ask to share your feedback with us. These messages do not include any promotional content and are not part of our marketing newsletter. If you wish to leave us feedback, it is visible on Reviews.co.uk’s website as well as in the footer of our website: https://www.reviews.co.uk/company-reviews/store/greatbritishbrandsusa. If you wish to leave any product reviews, these will then appear on those products’ pages. 

When sharing your feedback you can either stay anonymous or give your first name or nickname. No other details will be shared. 

Security of your data

When you shop at Great British Brands USA and share some of your personal data with us, you can rest assured that we take every step to make sure we handle it securely.

Our website uses end to end “https” technology across the entire site. Access to your data is password-protected and any sensitive information is encrypted and protected with 256 Bit encryption via TLS (Transport Layer Security).

For example, all order information is encrypted and transmitted via Transport Layer Security (TLS/SSL) technology directly from your browser to our secure servers.  It is only accessible by those who are authorized to access such systems, and only then to carry out tasks allowed in the contract, legal consent or legitimate interests as mentioned above.

Another example is, all supplied credit or debit card information is encrypted and transmitted via Transport Layer Security (TLS/SSL) technology directly from your browser to our payment gateway provider’s server only to be accessible by those who are authorized to access such systems and who are required to keep the information confidential. We do not ever see this information and the information never gets transmitted, seen or stored via our servers.

Use of cookies

'Cookies' are small pieces of information sent by a website to your computer and stored on your hard drive to allow that website to recognise you when you visit, to save your preferences & give you relevant content.  Cookies do not collect personally identifiable information such as your name, address or payment details, but may be used to link your actions to your personal information, for example to link you adding a product to your basket & account so you can then check out.

Go to Cookie Policy page.

Data Retention

We will retain your personal data only for as long as is necessary and only for the purpose for which it was obtained.

Your rights

You are entitled to view, amend, or delete the personal information that we store on you. Email your request to our Customer Service department.

If you have an account on our site, you can access your personal data by clicking on “My Account” in the website’s header, where you can update your personal data. To delete your account and all data it contains, please send a request to this effect to our Customer Service team.

If you’d like to amend your e-mail newsletter preferences, simply go to “update subscription preferences” at the bottom of each of our marketing emails to update the data we hold or to unsubscribe .

Review of this Policy

We keep this Policy under regular review. This Policy was last updated on 1^th Sep 2023.

Cookies Policy

What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files that can be stored on your computer or mobile device when you visit a website. These files are typically used to hold your user preferences, to store important data as you browse the website (such as the contents of your shopping cart), or to find out if you have browsed the website before.As these files can only store small amounts of data there is nothing dangerous about the files themselves, but some companies may use the information to track what other websites you have visited or to build a profile of your general online behaviour. Great British Brands USA do not involve themselves in these activities. Cookies we use don’t collect or store any sensitive information such as your name, address or payment card information.

What types of cookies are there?

Great British Brands USA, like most e-commerce websites, uses a variety of cookies to help ensure that our website functions correctly and to provide information on how to improve our pages and marketing.  We sometimes use third party agencies to advertise and bring traffic to certain parts of the site, for example where we have a specific campaign. These cookies are placed by one of our third-party agencies to allow them to track the activities of visitors that that have come to the site from their adverts.  Our use of cookies can be broken down into four main categories:

Necessary & Functional Cookies:  Necessary cookies are essential to make a website work and enable features that users have specifically asked for. Without these cookies, these features of the website could not operate properly. For example, these cookies remember the contents of your shopping cart or whether you are logged in as you browse the website, and to record the items that you have placed in your wish-list so that you can refer back to them. Functional cookies automatically remember preferences that users have previously made in order to enhance their experience next time they visit a website. All visitors to our website will have a cookie called PHPSESSID set in their browser. This cookie doesn’t store any personal information on your device. Without this cookie, you would not be able to login, add to basket or purchase with us online. Another cookie called JSESSION ID is set from our server performance and health monitoring solution. This cookie alerts us if there is an internal issue with our servers that run our sites. This cookie does not contain any personal information and cannot be used to identify a customer. On most pages we also show customer reviews using our third party trusted partner reviews.co.uk. They may set a cookie called __cfduid which is used to count the number of times a review is viewed.  We also work with a specialist email company called Mailchimp to provide a sign up form for which you can sign up to our newsletter. This popup may set a cookie called _AVESTA_ENVIRONMENT which is only used to determine that the popup has been shown to a customer.

Statistics Cookies.  Statistic cookies help us understand how visitors interact with our website by collecting and reporting information anonymously. The data gathered allows us to check how many people visited our pages, how many visitors have been to our website previously, which links people have clicked most often on our pages, etc. It also helps us identify problems with our pages and advise on improvements that can be made to make them easier to use. All the information collected is anonymous and no personal data is recorded. We use Google Analytics for this purpose.  Statistics cookies Google uses on our website include _ga which is used to count the number of visitors, sessions and page views. Google also uses _gat to limit collection rates and _gid which is a session based cookie for the collection of pages viewed. These cookies are not personally identifiable as your full IP address is scrambled before being recorded.  We also use cookies from Google and Bing such as ads/user-lists, MUID & _uetsid in order to track purchases if you have visited us via a paid advert. This enables us to monitor the effectiveness of that ad and we will not use this data to target you in any way.

Google's privacy policy is available at:  https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites/.
Bing's privacy policy is available at: https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-gb/privacystatement

Marketing Cookies. We use cookies to provide a remarketing service through Google Ads and Facebook, which allows us to advertise specifically to internet users that have previously visited our website and to highlight products and services that we believe, may be of interest to them. This advertising method allows us to show adverts to users with different interests and demographics based on the information that Google or Facebook provide. We allow Google and Facebook to set their own cookies such as IDE, DSID, Fr, tr in order for this feature to work correctly.  You can review your consent for personalised ads in general if you have an account with any of the following:

If you’d like to opt out of seeing personalised Google ads please go here:
https://support.google.com/ads/answer/2662922?hl=en-GB

To opt-out of seeing personalised ads on Facebook, please go to:
https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/?entry_product=ad_settings_screen

Personalisation.  We use cookies to store information about your site preferences and to personalise the website for you so that we can show you products you might like based on the products you’ve looked at before. These cookies are set and used by our service provider Episerver. These cookies include peerius_user & peerius_sess to be able to track the user journey and previous behaviour to be able to personalise content. peerius_rid is a cookie which tracks subsequent click through rates from the recommendations so we can analyse their effectiveness. The cookie peerius_ct is just a testing cookie.  Click the link below to see Episerver’s privacy statement: https://www.episerver.com/about/privacy/trust-center/privacy/

How can cookies be managed or disabled?

Our cookies will be stored automatically when you visit our website, based on our legitimate interest to provide you with the best possible service which you’d expect from an online retailer. You can easily change the way cookies are handled on your computer by adjusting the cookie settings within your internet browser. It is possible to manage which websites are allowed to create cookies on your computer as well as view or delete cookies that have already been stored.  There are many different internet browsers so we aren't able to give instructions on how to change the privacy and cookie settings in all of them, but we've provided links to the websites of the most popular browsers below. 

Apple Safari: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201265

Google Chrome: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95647

Microsoft Edge: https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-10-microsoft-edge-and-privacy

Mozilla Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/cookies-information-websites-store-on-your-computer#w_cookie-settings

Please note: Blocking all cookies from Great British Brands USA will prevent the Shopping Cart from functioning correctly and you will be unable to place an order through the website. 

You can also manage some cookies through websites like  Network Advertising Initiative , which allows you to opt-out from selected cookies.