Privacy Policy

Overview

Our store allows you to buy products and services, receive special discounts, fill out surveys, and receive newsletters, e-mails or other promotional information from us. We use the information that we collect about you to fulfill your product and service purchases and to create a more personalized online experience. This is just a brief overview, so please read on for more details about our Privacy Policy. This Policy may change from time to time, so please check back periodically.

What information do we collect from you?

In order to better provide you with numerous products and services, we collect two types of information about our visitors: Personally Identifiable Information and Non-Personally Identifiable Information. Our primary goal in collecting information from you is to provide you with a smooth, efficient, and customized experience while using our site.

Personally Identifiable Information
This refers to information that lets us know the specifics of who you are. Personal information is requested when you order a product or service, fill out surveys, and send us feedback. For example, this information might include your name, billing address, shipping address, telephone number, e-mail address, credit card or other payment information, and product details.

Non-Personally Identifiable Information
This refers to information that does not by itself identify a specific individual. We gather certain information about you based upon where you shop on our site in several ways. This information is compiled and analyzed on both a personal and an aggregated basis. For example, this information may include the Web site's Uniform Resource Locator ("URL") that you just came from, which URL you next go to, what browser you are using, and your Internet Protocol ("IP") address. A URL is the global address of documents and other resources on the World Wide Web. An IP address is an identifier for a computer or device on a Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol ("TCP/IP") network, such as the World Wide Web. Networks like the Web use the TCP/IP protocol to route information based on the IP address of the destination. In other words, an IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer whenever you are surfing the web, allowing web servers to locate and identify your computer. Computers require IP addresses in order for users to communicate on the Internet, browse and shop.

Where do we collect information from you and how do we use it?

Our primary goal in collecting personal information is to provide our visitors with a superior customized online experience. We use the customer contact information to fill orders, contact purchasers to inform them of their order status, to send promotional information, to enhance the operation of our site and administer our systems. We review the actions of our visitors on an aggregate basis to determine customers' preferences. We also do research on our visitors' pages viewed based on the information provided to us during ordering, a promotion, from our server log files, from our web site analysis agents, or from surveys. We will use this data to tailor the visitor's experience at our site, to improve our marketing and promotional efforts, to statistically analyze site use, to improve our product offerings, and to customize our site's content, layout, and services.

We gather information in the following ways:

Shopping
We collect IP addresses for the purposes of system administration to gather broad demographic information and to monitor the level of activity on our site. We collect information from visitors to our site regarding the URLs they came from, domain types (e.g., .com or .org), their IP addresses, the date and time of their visit or order, the number of visits and orders, the number of visits per browsing session, the server type, the operating system and browser type used to come to the site, the country, state and telephone area code where their servers are located, the pages and page titles of our site that visitors viewed during their visit, whether the visitor's computer is enabled for Java or cookies, browser language, applications and plug-ins, and any search terms entered on our site.

Ordering
When you order from us, we collect personally identifiable information from you. If you order one of our products, we will collect and maintain your name, e-mail address, billing address, shipping address, telephone number, product selections, credit card or other payment information, order number, referring URL, IP address, and page you bought from. We collect this, and other information, as disclosed in this Policy, in order to fill your order, to communicate with you about your order and to send you promotional materials. Before confirming your order, you will have the opportunity to review the product order form and make changes and additions to the information it contained and these changes will be automatically kept for future use.

Online Surveys and Polling
In order to improve our services to you, we ask some of our customers to voluntarily complete surveys. Individual survey answers are confidential, although Non-Personally Identifiable Information is collected. If you do not wish to participate in a survey, simply decline to participate when asked.

Newsletters & Promotional E-mails
We offer free newsletters, such as our promotional e-mails, as a service to our customers. We will send you newsletters and e-mails periodically listing current specials and deals. To stop receiving our newsletter, you can easily out-out be following the instructions in the e-mail.

Contact Information
If you contact us or our customer service representatives by telephone, e-mail or letter, we may keep a record of your correspondence or comments. If you report a problem with our site, we may collect such information in a file specific to you. If you contact us through our feedback area or by calling one of our customer service representatives, we may ask for your name, e-mail address and order information in order to send you a reply.

Advertising
We track customers' traffic patterns throughout their online session, including which pages and information a customer views while using the site and what items they place in their basket or purchase. We use your IP address to diagnose problems with our servers, software, to administer our site and to gather demographic information.

Cookies
We use cookies in the operation of our site. Please see the "Use of Cookies" section below.

Who is collecting your information?

We perform all data collection in-house, never allowing a 3rd-party to access unauthorized data.

With whom do we share your information?

Fulfillment: The information collected by our site is used for processing orders, keeping you informed about your order status, for statistical purposes, for improving our site and its performance, and to notify you of products or special offers that may be of interest to you. We will disclose your Personally Identifiable Information to third parties to charge your credit card, fill your order, deliver your order, provide customer service, and deliver promotional e-mails to you. For example, we must release your credit card information to the card-issuing bank to confirm payment; and release your address and telephone information to the delivery service to deliver products that you ordered.

Other Parties: We do not sell, trade, or rent your Personally Identifiable Information to others without your consent. We may release account information when we believe that such release is reasonably necessary to enforce or apply our policies or to protect the rights, property, and safety of Internet Retail Connection, our users, or others. If customers do not pay us for products ordered, we may submit their account information to a third party collection agency.

Compliance with Service of Process or Law Enforcement: Occasionally we may be asked by law enforcement or judicial authorities to provide Personally Identifiable Information to the appropriate governmental authorities. We will disclose Personally Identifiable Information upon receipt of a court order, subpoena, or to cooperate with a law enforcement investigation, without prior notice to you. Internet Retail Connection fully cooperates with law enforcement agencies in identifying those who use our services for illegal activities. We reserve the right to report to law enforcement agencies any activities that we believe to be unlawful.

How can you update or correct your Personally Identifiable Information?

During the online ordering process you can review, change, or delete the information that you have submitted. You may ask to have the information on your account deleted or removed; however, because we keep track of past purchases, you cannot delete information associated with past purchases. Also, as a security measure we "back up" the data stored on our systems, and such prior information cannot be completely removed from our databases. As a result, you should not expect that all of your Personally Identifiable Information will be completely removed from our backed-up databases.

What are your choices regarding collection, use, and distribution of your information?

Email: We may from time to time send you e-mail or other communications regarding current promotions, specials and new additions to our site. You may "opt-out," or unsubscribe from our newsletters by following the unsubscribe instructions in any e-mail you receive from us. After doing so, you will not receive future promotional emails unless you open a new account or sign up to receive newsletters or emails.

Cookies: You may also set your browser so that it will not accept "cookies" to prevent assignment from our servers of a unique identifier; however, you will be unable to buy on our site if you do so. You can still shop our site with cookies disabled.

What security precautions are in place to protect against the loss, misuse, or alteration of your information?

In order to most efficiently serve you, credit card transactions and order fulfillment are handled by established third party banking, processing agents and distribution institutions. They receive the information needed to verify and authorize your credit card or other payment information and to process and ship your order.

When you access your account information, the information is kept on a secure server. All of the customer data we collect is protected against unauthorized access by physical security means.

We do not store credit card information in our database at any time.

Use of "cookies"

When you use our site we will store cookies on your computer in order to facilitate and customize your use of our site. A cookie is a small data text file, which a Web site stores on your computer's hard drive (if your Web browser permits) that can later be retrieved to identify you to our site. Our cookies store randomly assigned user identification numbers, and the products and categories that you have viewed on our site. The cookies make your use of the site easier, allow you to retrieve an earlier shopping cart, make the site run more smoothly and help us to maintain a secure site. You will be unable to buy on our site without your browser set to accept cookies, but you can still browse our products.

Contacting us about privacy questions or concerns

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, the practices of this site, or your dealings with this site, please contact us. You can find our contact information in the "Customer Service" section of our site.

Privacy Policy changes

This Privacy Policy was last changed on March 12, 2004. If we makes changes to any terms or conditions of the Privacy Policy, the changes will be posted in this document so that you will always know what information we gather, how we might use that information and to whom we will disclose it. We may change, modify, add or remove portions of this Policy at any time, and any changes will become effective immediately upon being posted unless we tell you otherwise.