What is the EU cookie law
The Cookie Law is a privacy legislation set out ,that requires websites to notify and get consent from their visitors to store or retrieve the information on a computer, smartphone or tablet that has been stored in a cookie.
The legislation was designed to protect the privacy of visiotrs, by making thems aware of how information about them is collected and used online. Not only this but to also give them the option to consent or not.
Why we need cookies
Basically a large majority of websites use cookies and you won't ever notice. Cookies are like a short term memory that enables the website to hold information that you may have inputted or that its automatically gathered from your location and similar.
The data that it stores can be used throughout the whole website as without cookies it would forget you as you move from page to page.
An example is when you are on an ecommerce site like Affordable Fancy Dress, you will add a product to your cart which then takes you to another page. At this point a cookie has been written to store what products you have added to your cart. You then get asked to add your name, address and other information, which again is written to another cookie. You get taken to the checkout page and this is where the website will utilise those saved cookies to create your order.
Cookies have different expiry times, from seconds to days.
Enabling cookies
If you're having trouble with cookies, have a read of our section on enabling cookies.
List of cookies we collect
The table below lists what cookies our website collects and what they store.
| COOKIE name | COOKIE Description |
|---|---|
| CART | The association with your shopping cart. |
| CATEGORY_INFO | Stores the category info on the page, that allows to display pages more quickly. |
| COMPARE | The items that you have in the Compare Products list. |
| CURRENCY | Your preferred currency |
| CUSTOMER | An encrypted version of your customer id with the store. |
| CUSTOMER_AUTH | An indicator if you are currently logged into the store. |
| CUSTOMER_INFO | An encrypted version of the customer group you belong to. |
| CUSTOMER_SEGMENT_IDS | Stores the Customer Segment ID |
| EXTERNAL_NO_CACHE | A flag, which indicates whether caching is disabled or not. |
| FRONTEND | You sesssion ID on the server. |
| GUEST-VIEW | Allows guests to edit their orders. |
| LAST_CATEGORY | The last category you visited. |
| LAST_PRODUCT | The most recent product you have viewed. |
| NEWMESSAGE | Indicates whether a new message has been received. |
| NO_CACHE | Indicates whether it is allowed to use cache. |
| PERSISTENT_SHOPPING_CART | A link to information about your cart and viewing history if you have asked the site. |
| POLL | The ID of any polls you have recently voted in. |
| POLLN | Information on what polls you have voted on. |
| RECENTLYCOMPARED | The items that you have recently compared. |
| STF | Information on products you have emailed to friends. |
| STORE | The store view or language you have selected. |
| USER_ALLOWED_SAVE_COOKIE | Indicates whether a customer allowed to use cookies. |
| VIEWED_PRODUCT_IDS | The products that you have recently viewed. |
| WISHLIST | An encrypted list of products added to your Wishlist. |
| WISHLIST_CNT | The number of items in your Wishlist. |
