Data Policy

Data Protection Policy (January 2023)

Introduction

Welcome to the Vital Pet Group Limited (“Vital”) Privacy Policy.

Vital respects your privacy and is committed to protecting your personal and business data. This Privacy Policy will tell you how we look after your data when you visit our website and/or use our VDrive software (together referred to as the “website”) along with how we treat any personal data that you provide to us in verbal or written form, and inform you of your privacy rights and how the law protects you.

Purpose of this Policy

This Privacy Policy aims to give you information on how Vital Pet collects and processes your personal data.

Data Controller & Contact Details

Vital Pet is the controller and responsible for your personal data (collectively referred to as, “we”, “us” or “our” in this Privacy Policy).

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, including any requests to exercise your legal rights, please contact us and state that your query is for the attention of the Data Protection Lead.

Our contact details are:

• Postal address: Data Protection Lead, Vital Pet Group Ltd, Unit 16 Commercial Road, Goldthorpe, Bolton Upon Dearne, Rotherham, S63 9BL
• Telephone: 01837 883 000
• You can also contact us through the feedback form on our website.

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues (https://ico.org.uk). We would, however, appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the ICO so please contact us in the first instance.

Changes to the Data Protection Policy and Your Duty to Inform us of Changes

We may need to update this Policy at any time and without notice and where we do this we will notify you by email. This Policy was last updated on 23 May 2018.

It is important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and up to date. Please keep us informed if your personal data changes during your relationship with us.

The Data We Collect About You

Personal data, or personal information, means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been removed (anonymous data).

We may collect, use, store and transfer different kinds of personal data about you which we have grouped together follows:

• Identity Data - this includes your first name and last name.
• Contact Data – this is data that we use to contact you; including your billing address, delivery address, email address and telephone number.
• Financial Data - this is the information that we use to process your payments for your orders including your payment card details.
• Transaction Data - means details about transactions you have made on our website including details of products you have purchased from us.
• Profile Data - includes your login data, trading name, delivery address and purchases or orders made by you.

How Your Personal Data is Collected

We use different methods to collect data from and about you. These methods include; using our website, filling in forms or by corresponding with us by post, phone, email or otherwise. This includes personal data you provide when you:

• Purchasing products from us;
• create an account with us;
• request marketing to be sent to you;
• give us some feedback.

Third Part Sources of Data/Data Sharing

We also collect from and share data with Essential Service Providers. Sometimes, other businesses give us data about you which we may need for our legitimate interests of conducting business with you and on occasion they are necessary to perform our contract with you. Essential Service Providers may include:

• Cloud storage providers - we use cloud computing platforms that securely store all of our data, including customer details.
• Email service providers - in order to send you marketing content and transactional emails, we share your details with our email service providers.
• Delivery providers - in order to deliver your orders to you, it is sometimes necessary to share your information with third party delivery providers.
• Marketing and insights providers - marketing and insights tools allow us to understand our customers better so that we may provide you with the best possible website, products and customer service experience. We may share certain information about our customers to facilitate this process.
• When it is within our legitimate interests we may also share your data with professional advisers, investors, law enforcement and legal compliance bodies.

How We Use Your Personal Data

We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal data in the following circumstances:

• Where we need to perform the contract we are about to enter into or have entered into with you.
• Where it is necessary for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests.
• Where we need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation.

Purposes for Which We Will Use Your Personal Data

Listed below are the legitimate reasons for which will use your personal data:

• To register you as a new customer;
• To process and deliver your order;
• To manage payments, fees and charges relating to your order;
• To manage your queries through our Customer Service team - this may include recording calls to and from our teams, in the interests of ensuring our customer service quality standards are met;
• To carry out credit checks;
• To collect and recover money owed to us in respect of our order;
• To notify you in relation to our legal obligations including any changes to our Privacy Policy;
• To help us improve our offering to our customers, including asking you to leave a review or take a survey, or provide customer insights;
• To administer and protect our business and our website (including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting of data);
• To make suggestions and recommendations to you about goods or services that may be of interest to you.

Marketing

We may on occasion profile our customers for the purposes of targeting marketing at them and where this is done, this is undertaken for our legitimate interests of ensuring our marketing is relevant to its audience. For example, we may classify an appropriate audience for a promotion by what products on our website they have previously looked at or expressed an interest in.

We may on occasion contact you by telephone, post and/or email, for the purpose of growing our sales which is in our legitimate interests and in this scenario we will rely on you to let us know if you do not want to receive this.

You can ask us to stop sending you marketing messages at any time and can inform us by post, direct email or by using the unsubscribe link included on our marketing emails.

Where you opt out of receiving these marketing messages, this will not apply to personal data provided to us as a result of a product purchase, or related correspondence, and we will continue to process such data in accordance with this Privacy Policy and only ever as permitted by law.

Disclosures of Your Personal Data

We require all third parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law and they may only use your data for the purposes we specify in our contract with them. We will always work with them to protect your privacy.

Data Security

We take measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know.

Data Retention

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

Your Legal Rights

Under certain circumstances, you have rights under UK data protection laws in relation to your personal data. For example, you have the right to request access to your personal data (commonly known as a “data subject access request”) and you also have the right to request correction of the personal data that we hold about you. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) website, provides further information surrounding your legal rights.