Cookies
What are Cookies?
A cookie is a small amount of information that’s downloaded to your computer or device when you visit certain websites. We use a number of different cookies on our website, including strictly necessary, performance, and social media or content cookies. Cookies make your browsing experience better by allowing the website to remember your actions and preferences (such as login and region selection). This means you don’t have to re-enter this information each time you return to the site or browse from one page to another. Cookies also provide information on how people use the website, for instance whether it’s their first time visiting or if they are a frequent visitor. Read more about cookies (and other similar tracking technologies) and how we use the data collected through these technologies, in our Privacy Policy. For further reading, there is excellent resources on a website called All About Cookies. But we will try to explain a little about the types of cookies we use on this site in the name of transparency.
What cookies do we use and why?
Some cookies are necessary to allow you to browse our website, use its features, and access secure areas. The use of these cookies is essential for the website to work. For example, we use user-input cookies for the duration of a session to keep track of a user’s input when filling in forms that span several pages. It would probably get old pretty quick if you had to fill in your user name everytime you had to add something to your cart.
We also use functional cookies to remember choices you’ve made or information you’ve provided, such as your username, language, or the region you are in. This allows us to tailor your website experience specifically to your preferences. For example, authentication cookies are functional cookies that are used for the duration of a session (or persistent, if you agree to the “remember me” function) to allow users to authenticate themselves on subsequent visits or to gain access to authorized content across pages.
The functional cookies we use include:
• User-centric security cookies to detect authentication abuses for a limited persistent duration, like repeated failed login attempts. These cookies are set for the specific task of increasing the security of the service.
• Multimedia content player session cookies (flash cookies) are used for the duration of a session to store technical data needed to play back video or audio content (e.g. image quality, network link speed, and buffering parameters).
• Load balancing session cookies are used for the duration of the session to identify the same server in the pool in order for the load balancer to redirect user requests appropriately.
• User interface customization persistent cookies are used to store a user’s preference regarding a service across web pages.
We want to make your use of our site as pain free as possible so we use a few tools to help us improve our website. These cookies only gather information for statistical purposes and only use pseudonymous cookie identifiers that do not directly identify you.
The performance cookies we use include:
• First party analytics cookies - We use these cookies to estimate the number of unique visitors, to improve our websites and detect the most searched for words in search engines that lead to our webpage. These cookies are not used to target you with online marketing. We use these cookies to learn how our website is performing and make relevant improvements to improve your browsing experience.
• Third party analytics cookies - We also use Google Analytics and other third-party analytics providers listed below to help measure how users interact with our website content. These cookies “remember” what our users have done on previous pages and how they’ve interacted with the website. For more information on Google Analytics, visit Google’s information page. For instructions on how to opt out of Google Analytics, click here.
Read more about how companies use cookies to conduct targeted or retargeted advertising here. While we do not set advertising cookies through our site, we do place social media 'like' and 'share' buttons in our articles. This allows us to engage our customers through various social media platforms and let them know what we do. Please be aware that by clicking these buttons, the social site will be able to extract your information from the account you have with them. There are also other tools meant to provide or improve the content on our website (for example services that allow the playing of video files, or that create comments sections). We integrate these modules into our site to improve the experience of browsing and interacting with our website. Please note that some of these third party services place cookies in these modules that are used for things like behavioural advertising, analytics, and/or market research.
To give you a bit more information, we have compiled a few tables of the cookies used on our site:
