Privacy and Cookie Policy

Our Promise to Our Customers

We will always keep your data safe and secure. So that you are fully informed, here is why we need it and how we use it.

1. User Experience

We will only use your data to improve your experience when visiting or shopping on our website.

2. Security

We’ll protect your data like it’s our own.

3. Fully Informed

We’ll give you a simple and understandable breakdown of where your information is processed, stored and then erased.

4. Email Marketing

We will only contact you about related products to the ones you have purchased. This can include special offers, plant care guides and gardening tips and also competitions. If you don’t want to hear from us, we provide options at every stage to opt-out or unsubscribe from email marketing with just one click.

5. Your Personal Data

We won’t just keep your personal information — if we don’t need it, we’ll delete it.

How We Use Your Information

We use your information in a number of different ways — what we do depends on the information. Below is a breakdown of what we do and why.

1. Your Name and Contact Details

• Delivering your purchases — we’ve got to do this to perform our contract with you (it’s a bit hard to send your order if we don’t use your name and contact details).
• Service messages (phone, text or email, such as order updates) — to perform our contract so you know when your order is coming.
• Marketing communications (email and post) — to keep you up to date on related products or services to those you have purchased. You can unsubscribe at any time with one click.
• Fraud prevention and detection — to protect both you and Simplyplants from fraud.
• Online advertising — to show you Simplyplants adverts as you browse the web so you can see our latest products and deals.
• Customer insight — to find out what you and other customers like, so we can give you what you want.

2. Your Date of Birth

Used for fraud prevention and protection — to help protect both you and Simplyplants from fraud.

3. Your Payment Information

We do not store your card’s security / CVV code. We use your payment information to take payment and give refunds (to perform our contract with you), and for fraud prevention and detection.

4. Your Contact History With Us

What you’ve said to us — over the phone, on instant chat or on social media — is used to provide customer service and support (to perform our contract), and to train our staff so you get the best possible service.

5. Purchase History and Saved Items

We use your purchase history and saved items to sell you things, provide customer service and handle returns, and to understand what you and other customers like. This may include personal profiling to help us improve user experience across our website.

6. Information About Your Device and How You Use Our Website

Information you provide when browsing (IP address, device type, location data if shared, and how you use our website) is used to improve our website and set default options (such as language and currency), and to protect our website from fraud and meet our legal obligations.

7. Your Responses to Surveys, Competitions and Promotions

Used to run the survey, competition or promotion — we’ve got to use your entry so you can possibly win.

You don’t have to give us any of this personal information, but if you don’t, you may not be able to buy from the site and are unlikely to receive our optimal overall customer experience. That is your choice and we respect it.

We also anonymise and aggregate personal information (so that it does not identify you) and use it for purposes including testing our IT systems, research, data analysis, improving our site, and developing new products and services. We may share this anonymous data with third parties — as it cannot be tracked back to you personally.

Sharing Your Information

We do not, and will not, sell any of your personal data to any third party — including your name, address, email address or credit card information. We want to earn and maintain your trust, and we believe this is absolutely essential in order to do that. However, we do share your data with the following categories of companies as an essential part of being able to provide our services to you:

• Companies in the Simplyplants group — as sometimes different parts of our group are responsible for different processing activities.
• Fulfilment companies — such as payment service providers, warehouses, order packers and delivery companies that get your purchases to you.
• Professional service providers — marketing agencies, advertising partners and website hosts who help us run our business.
• Credit reference, law enforcement and fraud prevention agencies — so we can help tackle fraud.
• Marketplace sellers — where you place an order, and the relevant payment services (such as PayPal) where you choose to use their payment service.

We may provide third parties with aggregated but anonymised information and analytics about our customers and, before we do so, we will make sure that it does not identify you.

Marketing & Advertising

Marketing Messages

We will only send you marketing messages about products or services related to those you have purchased via email, to keep you up to date with what we’re up to and to help you see and find our products.

How to Stop Marketing Messages

You can stop receiving marketing messages from us at any time. You can do this by:

• Verbally informing the advisor taking your order over the telephone that you do not wish to receive marketing messages
• Clicking on the ‘unsubscribe’ link in any email
• Contacting our Privacy Manager

Once you do this, we will update your profile to ensure that you don’t receive further marketing messages. Please note that it might take a few days for all our systems to be updated, so you might get messages from us while we process your request. Stopping marketing messages will not stop service communications (such as order updates).

Seeing Adverts for Simplyplants Online

As part of our marketing activities, we engage in online advertising to keep you aware of what we’re up to and to help you find our products. Like many companies, we target Simplyplants banners and adverts to you when you are on other websites. We use a variety of digital marketing networks and ad exchanges, and technologies like web beacons, pixels, ad tags, cookies and mobile identifiers, as well as specific services offered by social networks (such as Facebook’s Custom Audience service).

The banners and ads you see will be based on information we hold about you, your previous use of Simplyplants (such as your search history and the content you read on Simplyplants), or previous Simplyplants banners or ads you have clicked on.

Data Transfers & Retention

Your Information and Countries Outside Europe

Simplyplants processes and holds all its data within the UK and the European Union, and its data is subject to all current UK and EU data protection and usage regulations.

Further information on these regulations can be accessed via the Information Commissioner’s Office website, particularly with regard to the two main sets of regulations applicable to Simplyplants: the ‘Guide to Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations’ (PECR) and ‘General Data Protection Regulations’ (GDPR).

Keeping Your Information

We’ll only hold on to your information for as long as is needed to be able to provide services to you, or (in the case of any contact you may have with our Customer Care team) for as long as is necessary to provide support-related reporting and trend analysis only.

If reasonably necessary or required to meet legal or regulatory requirements, resolve disputes, prevent fraud and abuse, or enforce our terms and conditions, we may also keep or hold some of your information as required, even after you have closed your account or it is no longer needed to provide the services to you.

Changes to How We Protect Your Privacy

We may change this page from time to time, to reflect how we are processing your data. If we make significant changes, we will make that clear on the Simplyplants website or other Simplyplants services, or by some other means of contact such as email, so that you are able to review the changes before you continue to use Simplyplants.

Cookies

Our website uses cookies. By using our website you consent to all cookies in accordance with our Cookie Policy.

A number of our pages use cookies to remember details about your site preferences when you visit, this is to ensure you have the best experience on our website. We are currently undergoing site development that once completed will enable our customers to have more control over their consent to cookies by providing an ‘opt out’ option.

Some videos embedded in our pages use a cookie to anonymously gather statistics on how you got there and what videos you visited, which helps us to know what content is of interest and informs what we do in the future.

Enabling these cookies is not strictly necessary for the website to work but it will provide you with a better browsing experience. You can delete or disable cookies in your browser settings, but if you do so, some features of this site may not work as intended.

For more information see our Cookie Policy.

Your Rights

You have a lot of rights relating to your personal information:

• The right to be informed about how your personal information is being used
• The right to access the personal information we hold about you
• The right to request the correction of inaccurate personal information we hold about you
• The right to request that we delete your data, or stop processing it or collecting it, in some circumstances
• The right to stop direct marketing messages, which you can do by unsubscribing from our marketing messages or contacting our Privacy Manager, and to withdraw consent for other consent-based processing at any time
• The right to request that we transfer or port elements of your data either to you or another service provider
• The right to complain to your data protection regulator — in the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office

If you want to exercise your rights, have a complaint, or just have questions, please contact us.

How to Contact Us

We always want to hear from our customers (especially if you feel we’ve let you down or could do better).

If you:

• Have any questions or feedback about this notice
• Would like us to stop using your information
• Want to exercise any of your rights as set out above, or have a complaint

Please don’t hesitate to contact our Privacy Manager, who will be happy to answer any questions you may have.