1. INTRODUCTION
We respect your privacy and take the protection of your personal information very seriously. We will be transparent about how and why we use your data. Your authorised personal details are held securely and in strict confidence in accordance with the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA)
The purpose of our Privacy Policy is to describe the way we use, collect, store and protect your private information. We know that security is very important when buying online, so we use the latest technology to protect your personal and credit card details. We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
Please make sure you have read through our privacy policy.
By reading the policy, you agree to our terms.
2. AUDIENCE
The policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use:
- Our website
- Order or request the goods or service we provide
- Our other Automatic products, services, and features that are available on or through our websites (for example, WordPress.com plans, the Payments feature, the Pay with PayPal block, WordPress.com VIP, the U-Africa Shipping & Tax portal, Dear System (Stock Inventory System).
- Subscribe to our newsletter created by Mail Blaze.
3. PERSONAL INFORMATION WE COLLECT
We only collect personal information from our customers under the following circumstances:
- To provide a service
- To communicate with you
- Or to make our service better
We collect your information from three sources:
- Automatically when you visit our website
- On registration/subscription
- Through online purchases
It excludes the following:
- Anonymous
- De-identified
- Non-personal statistical
- Public information
The information that we collect:
- Identifying information, such as your name and surname, identification number of any kind, username and password
- Contact information such as email address, phone number
- Address information such as physical or postal address
- Demographic information such as gender, marital status
- Purchase data such as date and time of purchase, you’ll provide personal and payment information like your name, credit card information, and contact information. Additional data – delivery data, product data, details of managing your orders.
- Data about online browser history such as length of visit, returning users, geographic origin, page visits
- Your feedback, requests, complaints, questions or interactions such as messages, chats, social media posts, email or phone calls
- Sensitive personal information:
- Financial information for when you make online purchases such as bank account details
- Demographic information such as race/ethnicity
Please Note: This website is not intended for children and we do not knowingly collect data relating to children.
Your obligations– You may only send us:
- Your own personal information
- Someone else’s personal information if you have their permission to do so
4. USAGE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION
We gather and use your personal data for a variety of reasons, including:
- Creating a Cook-Out Account:
- We will use your data to create an account which will give you:
- Access to rewards for our loyal and registered users
- To better enjoy our services
- Track your order
- Any processing activity is required to enable us to provide these services to you as an account holder.
- We will use your data to create an account which will give you:
- Managing and fulfilling your orders, providing service and support to you:
- We will use your data to:
- Manage our contractual relationship with you
- Your purchase of products on the website
- Your use of the website
- After-sales support
- Your participation in competitions
- We may have to use your data for administrative purposes connected to our contractual relationship with you such as:
- Accounting, billing & audit,
- Fraud screening & card verification during payment,
- Safety & security,
- Maintenance & systems testing
- Administrative or operational reasons, e.g., to send you confirmation of your purchase
- Your personal data will be used to reply to requests sent through our website forms or other channels
- We will use your data to:
- Review products purchased: If you purchased one of our products, we may send an email asking for your products’ review. This assists us in the continuous improvement of our products and services. At the end of the purchase process, we invite you to write your product review. The review is not mandatory.
- Marketing purposes if you have given permission to our doing so:
- Engaging in legitimate marketing efforts, i.e., via our mailing list to keep you up to date with the latest goods and/or services or promotions.
- We will use your data to better understand your interests. The data will enable us to ensure we have a personalised approached in our communication.
- We also gather statistics and insights around email opening and clicks using industry standard technologies to monitor our newsletters. Your consent is required in order to receive personalised marketing communications from us.
- Create targeted content: while logged into the website, we may display targeted adverts and other relevant information based on your personal information and match it to adverts or related information. We never share personal information with any advertisers.
- Disclosure: we may share your personal information with other divisions or companies within the group to which we belong, to provide services like registration, customer support etc.
- The opt-in choice can be exercised where personal information is collected (e.g., newsletters, website etc.) by selecting the appropriate checkbox or, if you have a Cook-Out Account
- Opt-out: You can use the unsubscribe button to stop receiving our updates at any time. If you have a Cook-Out Account, you can easily manage your marketing preferences. We will process your opt-out as soon as possible, but in some circumstances you may receive a few more messages until the opt-out is processed completely.
- Analytical purposes to create tailored customer experience and re-targeting: Your data will enable a tailored services and offers to your needs and preferences to provide you with a personalised customer experience. We will do this by analysing your behaviours or interests (who did what and when), for example:
- Number of visits to our website
- Location information, based on IP address calculate number of people visited the site from certain geographical area.
- Most viewed products
- Pages accessed on our website
- Time spent per page
- Content engaged with/read
- Engagement with promotions
- Customer journey from adding to cart to successful checkout
- Social media interaction
- We use cookies and similar technologies. We will use this information to manage our advertising on other sites, grant access to specific content, tailor the contents or the offers that you see on the website or, if you have consented to subscribing to our newsletter, to send you relevant communication/message that we think you may like. There will be no other effects.
- The use of cookies is subject to your consent. If you wish not to have this information used for sending you interest-based ads, contents or communications, you can limit the usage of the information about your online actions by managing your cookie setting (however, please remember that certain cookies are necessary for using the website). Please note this does not opt you out of being served ads, offers, or communications. You will continue to receive generic ads, offers, or communications.
- Disclosure – sharing your information: We share information about you in limited circumstances, and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy. These are spelled out below.
- Internal divisions & employees:
- We may share your personal information with other divisions within the Group to which we belong to provide services like registration, transport, customer support etc.
- We may need to disclose personal information to our employees so that they can do their jobs in order to provide services, but will not be done unnecessarily.
- We require our employees to follow this Privacy Policy for any personal information that we share with them.
- Third Party Vendors:
- We may share information about you with third-party vendors who need the information in order to provide their services to us,
- Or to provide their services to you or your site. This includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like Payfast, which powers WooCommerce Payments, payment providers that process your credit and debit card information,
- Payment providers you use for your own e-commerce operations,
- Fraud prevention services that allow us to analyze fraudulent payment transactions,
- Cloud storage services,
- Postal and email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you like U-Africa
- Customer chat and email support services that help us communicate with you,
- Registrars, registries, data escrow services that allow us to provide domain registration services,
- Legal objectives: We may need to process some of your data to fulfil our legal obligations and other obligations arising from instructions received from regulators or law enforcement.
- By subpoena or court order
- To comply with any law
- To protect the safety of any individual or the general public and
- To prevent violation of our customer relationship terms
- No Selling: We will not sell personal information
- Marketing purposes:
- We may disclose aggregate statistics (information about the customer population in general terms) about the personal information to advertisers or business partners.
- Change of Ownership:
- If we undergo a change in ownership, or a merger with, acquisition by, or sale of assets to, another entity, we may assign our rights to the personal information we process to a successor, purchaser, or separate entity.
- We will disclose the transfer on the website.
- If you are concerned about your personal information migrating to a new owner, you may request us to delete your personal information
- Internal divisions & employees:
5. SECURITY
While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so. We monitor our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.
To enhance the security of your account, we have a two-step authentication process.
Our website will be hosted in a secure server environment with a firewall and other advanced security measures to prevent outside attackers from interfering with or accessing it.
We use organisational, technical and administrative security measures to help protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of your personal data. Whilst we cannot guarantee any of these events will never occur, we use all reasonable efforts to prevent it.
We authorise access to personal information only for those employees who require it to fulfil their job responsibilities. We will implement disaster recovery procedures where appropriate and necessary.
We shall notify the appropriate Regulator including you if we have reasonable grounds to think that an unauthorized third party has accessed your personal information, and if required by law.
If the law requires us to inform you, we will give you enough information to allow you to take precautions against the breach’s potential repercussions.
6. ACCESS
- You may ask us to provide you with a description of the personal information that we hold of you, correct it, update it or delete it (provided that we do not need it to fulfil our obligations to you or applicable law does not require us to keep it).
- We will take all reasonable steps to verify your identity before doing so. We may charge a fee to recoup our costs associated with this request if there is a cost to us associated with it and provided that applicable law allows us to do so.
- Please contact us with your name and any other information needed to identify you correctly if you want access to information or want us to correct, update or delete it.
7. ACCURATE AND UP TO DATE
- We will try to keep the personal information we collect as accurate, complete and up to date as is necessary for the purposes defined in this policy.
- From time to time we may request you to update your personal information on the website.
- You are able to review or update any personal information that we hold on you by accessing your account online, emailing us, or phoning us.
- Please note that in order to better protect you and safeguard your personal information, we take steps to verify your identity before granting you access to your account or making any corrections to your personal information.
Please keep your personal information accurate and up to date by accessing your account online, emailing us, or by phoning us.
8. REGISTRATION & SUBMISSION
Your personal information may be used to fulfil our commitments to you. We may send you administrative notifications and website updates through email.
We may want to send you information about new products or services in which we believe you would be interested in.
This implies that we may send you promotional communications in some situations.
Unless you have elected to receive promotional communications, by unsubscribing as per your request or decision, we will not send them to you.
Where permitted by law, we may use your information to send you administrative messages and email updates about the website, as well as for marketing reasons.
9. COOKIES AND BROWSER
We automatically receive and record Internet usage information from your web application on our server logs, such as your IP address, browsing habits, click trends, implemented software version, system type, language settings, cookie preferences, search engine keywords, JavaScript enablement, the content and pages that you access on the website, and the dates and times that you visit the website, paths taken, and time spent on sites and pages within the website.
When you visit our website, a cookie is a little piece of data (typically in the form of a text file) that is stored on your device.
These files do not include personal information, but they do contain a unique identifier that allows us to link your personal information to a specific device, allowing us to “remember” user behavior by recognizing your browser and monitoring mobility. Cookies are saved on your computer’s local hard disk or in your browser.
10. CHANGES
We may change the terms of this policy at any time by updating this web page. We will notify you of any changes by placing a notice in a prominent place on the website or by sending you an email detailing the changes that we have made and indicating the date that they were last updated.
If you do not agree with the changes, then you must stop using the website and our goods or services. If you continue to use the website or our goods or services following notification of a change to the terms, the changed terms will apply to you and you will be deemed to have accepted those updated terms.
We ensure that we review the privacy notice regularly.
Privacy Notice last updated on 9 May April 2022.
11. QUERIES
Please contact us at [email protected] if you have any questions or issues about our privacy policy or how we handle personal information.
You have the option of correcting or updating the personal information you’ve provided to us. To get your details updated, you can contact us with your needs and we will amend and remove were needed.
By accepting this policy, you are deemed to have read, understood, accepted, and agreed to be bound by all of its terms.