At Simply Vets (Pty) Ltd, we care about Your Privacy. This policy document explains how we obtain, use, and disclose your personal information, in accordance with the requirements of the Protection of Personal Information Act (“POPIA”).
We are committed to protecting your privacy and to ensure that your personal information is collected and used properly, lawfully, and transparently. The Protection of Personal Information Act (“POPIA”) creates the following rights for You as a South African citizen and / or data subject:
According to the Act “personal information” means information relating to an identifiable, living, natural person and where it is applicable, an identifiable, existing juristic person. Further to the POPI Act (“POPIA”), we also include the following items as personal information:
We collect and process your personal information mainly to contact you for the purposes of fulfilling your order requests (order placement and delivery), understanding your requirements and needs (contact us or request for quotes), and delivering services accordingly. For this purpose, we will collect contact details and shipping details, including your name, address, and telephone details.
We collect information directly from you where you provide us with your personal details. Where possible, we will inform you what information you are required to provide to us and what information is optional.
Website usage information may be collected using “cookies” which allows us to collect standard internet visitor usage information.
While you visit our site, we track:
We also use cookies to keep track of cart contents while you are browsing our site. Whether you use the website purely for information purpose, or decide to register and purchase something from us, we collect the following data which your browser transmits to our server.
When you purchase from us, we will ask you to provide information including your name, billing address, shipping address, email address, phone number and optional account information like username and password. We use this information for purposes, such as, to:
We generally store information about you for as long as we need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it, and we are not legally required to continue to keep it. For example, we will store order information for 5 (five) years for tax and accounting purposes. This includes your name, email address and billing and shipping addresses.
We will also store comments or reviews if you choose to leave them.
When visitors or you submit a form, we capture the IP Address for spam protection. We also capture the email address and might capture other personal data included in the Form fields.
We DO NOT ask for credit card or payment details, nor do we store these details. Upon selecting your payment method, you will be redirected to one of the trusted payment gateways available in South Africa to process the payment. The payment gateway(s) we use will encrypt through the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS). Your purchase transaction data is stored only if is necessary to complete your purchase transaction. After that is complete, your purchase transaction information is deleted. Payment gateways adhere to these standards set by PCI-DSS as managed by the PCI Security Standards Council, which is a joint effort of brands like Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover.
We will use your personal information only for the purposes for which it was collected and agreed with you. In addition, where necessary, your information may be retained for new order, repeat order, legal or research purposes.
For example:
We may disclose your personal information to our service providers who are involved in the delivery of products and services to you, for example, courier services. We have agreements in place to ensure that they comply with the privacy requirements as required by the Protection of Personal Information Act.
We may also disclose your information:
For order fulfilment, we share only the minimum information required with third parties who help us provide our orders and store services to you; for example:
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. We collect information about you during the checkout process on our store.
We are legally obliged to provide adequate protection for the personal information we hold and to stop unauthorized access and use of personal information. We will, on an on-going basis, continue to review our security controls and related processes to ensure that your personal information remains secure.
Our security policies and procedures cover:
When we contract with third parties, we impose appropriate security, privacy, and confidentiality obligations on them to ensure that personal information that we remain responsible for, is kept secure.
We will ensure that anyone to whom we pass your personal information agrees to treat your information with the same level of protection as we are obliged to.
If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You have the right to request a copy of the personal information we hold about you. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
To request your information, use our request form here. Your account must be validated and verified for the request form to work.
You have the right to ask us to update, correct or delete your personal information. To request your information, use our request form here. Your account must be validated and verified for the request form to work. We appreciate it if you would keep your personal information accurate.
When visitors leave comments on the site, we collect the data shown in the comments form, and the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
If you leave a comment on our site, you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
Here is a list of cookies that we use via WooCommerce. We have listed them here for your information only.
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
For users that register on our website, we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
If your account goes dormant after six months of registration, we automatically delete the account, and you will have to reregister.
Members of our team have access to the information you provide us. For example, both Administrators and Shop Managers can access:
No one in our organization have access to any other information, including payment or financial. We do not capture, nor do we store this information.
We accept payments through PayFast. When processing payments, some of your data will be passed to PayFast, including information required to process or support the payment, such as the purchase total and billing information. You can view the PayFast privacy policy here. No data is shared with WooCommerce.Com in this process.
We never sell your personal information to any third party. The only third parties that use, collect and / or store your personal data does so to the extent that is necessary to allow them to perform the services they provide to us. These third parties have their own privacy policies and terms of use that you find on their webpages.
Our website is using WordPress and WooCommerce. You can review the privacy policy for WooCommerce by Automattic here, and the WordPress policy here.
We host our site with WPMU DEV, owned and operated by Incsub, LLC. Incsub, LLC provides WordPress and web hosting services via WPMU DEV, CampusPress, and Edublogs. Their privacy policy can be found here. The following services and plugins are used on our website, and may store personal information:
The following services and plugins are used on our website, and may add Cookies:
The following services and plugins require integration with other 3rd party services:
We use Mailpoet to send email and newsletter subscriptions. Their privacy policy can be found here.
We use Google reCAPTCHA for spam protection. Their privacy policy can be found here.
We use Google Search and Analytics for analytics and statistics. Their privacy policy can be found here.
We use Microsoft Bing Search and Clarity for analytics and statistics. You can view the Microsoft Privacy Policy here, and Microsoft Clarity Terms of Use here.
We use Akismet Spam for spam protection. Their privacy policy can be found here.
We use Twilio Cloud Communications services for Mobile Short Message Services (SMS) and WhatsApp notifications. You can find their privacy policy here.
We use Google Drive and Google Sheets to manage our integration data. Their privacy policy can be found here.
The controller has integrated the component Google Analytics (with anonymisation function) on this website. Google Analytics is a web analytics service. Web analysis is the gathering, collection and analysis of data about the behavior of visitors to websites. Among other things, a web analysis service collects data on which website a data subject has come to a website from (so-called referrers), which subpages of the website were accessed or how often and for which period of time a subpage was viewed. A web analysis is mainly used to optimize a website and for the cost-benefit analysis of Internet advertising.
The operator of the Google Analytics component is Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View, CA 94043-1351, USA.
Google Analytics uses cookies. The information generated by the cookie about your use of this website is usually transmitted to a Google server in the USA and stored there. Google might transfer the personal information collected via this technical procedure to third parties.
As IP anonymization is activated on our website, your IP address will be shortened by Google within Member States of the European Union or other states in agreement with the European Economic Area. Only in exceptional cases, the full IP address is sent to and shortened by a Google server in the USA. On behalf of the operator of the website, Google will use this information to evaluate your use of the website, compile reports on website activity and to provide further services related to website and internet use to us. The IP address transferred through your browser to Google Analytics will not be combined with other data held by Google.
In addition, this website uses the Analytics feature UserID to track interaction data. This User ID will be additionally anonymized and encrypted and will not be linked with other data.
You can prevent the storage of cookies by a corresponding setting of your browser software; however, please note that if you do this, you may not be able to use all the features of this website to the fullest extent possible.
In addition, you may prevent the collection of the data generated by the cookie and related to your use of the website (including your IP address) by Google as well as the processing of this data by Google by downloading and installing the browser plug-in available under the following link.
This browser add-on informs Google Analytics via JavaScript that no data and information about website visits may be transmitted to Google Analytics.
In addition, a cookie already set by Google Analytics can be deleted at any time via the Internet browser or other software programs.
Further information and Google‘s applicable privacy regulations can be found here and details about the marketing platforms here. The following link provides a further explanation of Google Analytics.
Our website also uses Google Analytics performance reports relating to demographics and interests and reports on Google Display Network impressions. You can disable Google Analytics for display advertising and customize the ads on the Google Display Network by visiting the ad settings at this link.
This website uses Google Tag Manager. Through this service so-called website tags can be managed centrally via a user interface. Google Tag Manager only implements tags. No cookies are used and no personal information is collected.
For each third-party data collection, Google will provide a respective privacy policy. However, Google Tag Manager will not access these data. If deactivation has been implemented for certain domains / websites or cookies, it will remain in effect for all tracking tags as far as they are implemented with the Google Tag Manager.
With your consent, we will use Facebook’s “tracking pixel”. This pixel can be used to track user behavior after they have been redirected to our website by clicking on a Facebook and / or Instagram ad. This allows us to record the effectiveness of Facebook and Instagram advertisements for statistical and market research purposes and, if necessary, to take optimization measures. The tracking of users who have landed on our website after clicking on one of our Facebook and Instagram ads can remain active up to 180 days.
The data collected in this way is anonymous for us, i.e. we do not see the personal data of individual users. However, this data is stored and processed by Facebook, about which we will inform you to the best of our knowledge.
Facebook may connect this data to the Facebook account and also use it for its own advertising purposes, according to its data usage policy.
If you want to disable cookie storage for Facebook, you can do so via your browser settings.
We also use Facebook communication tools, especially the “Custom Audiences” and “Website Custom Audiences” products. Basically, a non-reversible and non-personal checksum (hash value) is generated from your usage data, which can be transmitted to Facebook for analysis and marketing purposes.
If you want to refuse the usage of Facebook’s “Website Custom Audiences”, you can do so by following this link.
In addition, we use Customer Match Lists within the framework of our Facebook advertising activities, for instance for “Lookalike Audiences” and remarketing. To use Customer Match, lists of encrypted user data are uploaded to Facebook. After the upload, the system checks which data is already known and places these users in a list. After creating the customer match lists, the encrypted customer data is automatically deleted. Facebook does not gather new addresses in this way (encryption).
