Privacy and Security Information

Privacy Policy

VeggiePets.com is a Trading Name of Vegeco Ltd (Registered in England & Wales Company No.5896605).

We provide the following information to inform you about what information we do (and do not) record and store about our customers. If you have any queries that are not answered here please feel free to call us.

We NEVER share customers’ details with anyone else.

You can be assured that your personal details will not be distributed to any third party (except where this may be required by law enforcement agency and only then when we are satisfied it is necessary).

Details provided to us will be used only for fulfilling customer orders, responding to enquiries and monitoring the performance of our website.

The personal information we collect about You may include: Your name, Your address, Your telephone numbers, Your email address. These details are not retained on our servers. We are required by law to retain records of sales for many years, after which time they will be destroyed in a manner that renders them unreadable.

Tracking on VeggiePets.com
In addition to customer order and address details we keep records of activity on our site. These records DO NOT allow us to monitor individual visitors – they provide us with an overview of the website’s performance and to help us identify ways in which we may need to improve our service.

Information we monitor includes:
IP address (which may identify the country of origin of the connection)
What pages are being viewed and for how long.
What search engines brought people to the site and what search terms they used
What operating systems and browsers were being used (e.g. Win Vista + IE8).

Again we must stress that this information does not identify anyone individually and is often quite vague. For example, IP address often resolve to data centres in a large city so do not indicate what town or street you are in. The aggregated data that is collected about the site helps us to make sure the site is functioning and displaying properly. For example, we may be able to determine that 80% of visitors use IE7 on Windows and 7% use FireFox on a Mac. We will be able to make sure that despite the browsers and operating systems being different that people can always see the site normally.

You may ask us to provide you with details of the information we keep about you. Please email Orders {at} Veggie Pets .com for more information.

Use of Cookies and JavaScripts
Our shop makes use of 'cookies' and 'javascripts' to enable it to operate correctly.

Cookies are very small data files stored only on your computer. They are created by your browser to record temporary information, for example listing the items that you have in your shopping basket, or which country you selected for delivery. This is essential if your shopping basket is to function normally, as it will use that data to make the calculations for prices, delivery costs etc. Cookies only store information about the cart contents until you decide to leave or purchase those items.

JavaScripts are small pieces of code in the web pages of our site that allow extra functionality. They may be used for things as simple as making images change as you put your mouse over them, or for complicated calculations. For example, we use them to calculate the price per kilo of the dog food.

If you choose to disable Cookies or JavaScripts on your browser you will experience problems using this website and very many others on the Internet. Cookies and JavaScripts on our site do not pose security threats but they make the Internet more interesting and useful.

Secure Payment Page
Our online payments are handled by Secure Hosting, a well established firm that has been trading since 1998 providing secure payments for 2500 businesses.

We have designed VeggiePets.com to work with their Universal Payment Gateway system. We collect your order details on our website which records the order before you are then sent to the Secure Hosting servers where you can safely enter you details so they can process the card payments. Their servers use 128-bit encryption to protect your card data.

How safe is this encryption?
We use a 128bit encryption 'key' means that it is not at all likely that someone could decode the data - There are so many possible keys with 128bit that it would take significantly longer than the age of the universe to "guess" one.

2 bit encryption would be 2x2 giving 4 key combinations; 5 bit would be 2x2x2x2x2 = 32 key combinations.

128-bit encryption means that there are a lot of possible combination - in fact OVER
339,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
different possible keys.

Even taking into consideration that computers in the future may get faster and faster it could take thousands of millions of years to crack the code and decrypt your card details - by which time you will probably not need to worry about it!

So please feel confident to leave your payment details with us on your orders.

Safe shopping Checklist
The are some simple things you can check to decide if a website is secure:

1. Look for the "s" after "http" in the address whenever you are about to enter sensitive information, such as a credit-card number, into a form on a Web site. This means your connection is secured by 128bit encryption.
   
   
2. The padlock symbol lets you know that you are using encryption.
   
   
3. Check how the card will be processed. Is the payment handler a company that you can find out about online, do they seem trustworthy and are they being used by other trustworthy websites.

If this encryption is so good why is there so much Internet fraud?
Well we have the media to thank for that feeling (as with many scares). What is not well reported is that the vast majority of fraudulent card use is against RETAILERS with cards stolen in the physical world, such as restaurants, petrol stations and high street shops, sometimes offices even from the un-shredded rubbish they throw out each week.

We have not yet had a customer who has had their card compromised by shopping online, however we have seen many people attempt to purchase products from us with stolen cards (and fail of course!) which were obtained from the card being cloned or copied in the 'real world'.

In these cases it is the retailer that usually loses out if they send the goods. Your bank should automatically reimburse your card for transactions you did not authorise and the funds are taken back from the retailer by the card issuer.

So simply using your card online will not put you at higher risk than handing it over to dozens of strangers every week in shops, pubs, restaurants etc... especially if you follow the advice above and look for the signs that the website you are connected to is secure.

If you still feel uneasy about paying with your card you can place your order online and then call us with your card details or fax them. We can then process them on a terminal just like you see in shops that process the cards down a fixed land line.