Privacy policy

SLS Engineering Supplies is the controller of the personal information described in this policy, which means we decide how and why it is used. SLS Engineering Supplies (also written S L S Engineering Supplies) is the trading name of a partnership run by Stuart Haston, and the business is not a limited company.

• Address: Unit 1C, Inchmuir Road, Whitehill Industrial Estate, Bathgate, West Lothian EH48 2EP, United Kingdom
• Email: stuartslseng@gmail.com
• Phone: 01506 639893

Questions about this policy or your information can be emailed to us with "Data protection" in the subject line. We are not required to appoint a data protection officer, so please contact us directly.

Your name, billing and delivery addresses, email address and phone number, what you ordered, the delivery and service options you chose, and any notes you add. For a business order, we also collect the business name and, if you give it, its VAT number. If you book installation, we may ask about access to the site, such as the floor level, whether there is a goods lift and where to park.

Stripe, our payment provider, takes card payments for us. We receive confirmation that the payment went through, with limited details such as the card type and the last four digits of the card. Your full card number, expiry date and security code never reach us.

If you use another payment method offered at checkout, such as a digital wallet or a pay later option, its provider also handles your information under its own privacy policy. A pay later provider may carry out its own checks before it agrees to the payment.

Your name, email address and password, the addresses you save and your order history. Your password is stored in a scrambled (hashed) form, so nobody at SLS can read it.

What you give us on the contact form or the quote request form, such as your name, email address, phone number, business name, delivery location, the items and quantities you are interested in, and your message. If you email or phone us, we keep a record of what was said and anything we agreed.

Our forms are protected against spam by hCaptcha, which processes your IP address and information about your device and browser while you use the form. "Who receives your information" explains this.

Your email address, plus a note of when and where you gave your consent.

Technical information such as your IP address, your browser and device type, the pages you look at, the page that sent you to us and the date and time of your visit. Some of this comes from cookies and similar technologies, as our Cookie policy explains, and some from the logs our platform keeps to run the website securely.

The platform our shop runs on, Orbit Commerce, also records the pages viewed during each visit so that we can see how the website is used. It uses a random visitor reference stored in your browser, works out your country from your IP address and does not store the IP address with the record. Our Cookie policy gives the details.

You do not need an account, or to tell us who you are, to look around the website.

Our payment provider tells us the result of its fraud checks, hCaptcha tells us whether a form was filled in by a person, and our warehouse partner and its couriers tell us about the progress of your delivery, for example when it has been delivered or if there was a problem.

We sell to adults and businesses, and we do not knowingly collect children's information. We do not ask for sensitive information, such as details of your health, religion or ethnic origin, so please do not send it to us.

Data protection law allows us to use personal information only where we have a lawful basis. Here is what we do with your information and the basis for each use.

• Taking, processing and delivering your order, including taking payment and passing your delivery details to our warehouse partner, its couriers and installers. Basis: contract, because we need the information to fulfil your order or to take steps you have asked for before ordering. Where you order on behalf of a business, our basis is our legitimate interests in fulfilling that business's order.
• Emails about your order, such as order, dispatch and delivery updates. Basis: contract.
• Running your account. Basis: contract.
• Dealing with cancellations, returns, refunds, faults and complaints. Basis: contract, our legal obligations under consumer law, and our legitimate interests in putting problems right and settling disputes.
• Answering enquiries and preparing quotes. Basis: our legitimate interests in answering people who get in touch, or, for a quote, steps you asked us to take before a possible contract.
• Keeping accounting, tax and VAT records. Basis: legal obligation.
• Sending our newsletter and other marketing emails. Basis: your consent.
• Keeping the website and our customers safe, preventing fraud and keeping spam out of our forms. Basis: our legitimate interests in keeping SLS and its customers safe from fraud and misuse.
• Understanding how the website is used, so that we can improve it, through the platform's visitor statistics and, if you allow analytics cookies, the cookies in that category. Basis: our legitimate interests in running a useful website, and your consent where the law requires it for cookies.
• Finding and fixing technical faults. Basis: our legitimate interests in keeping the website working.
• Meeting our legal duties and protecting our legal rights, such as answering lawful requests from authorities or dealing with a legal claim. Basis: legal obligation or our legitimate interests.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed our interests against yours, and we do not use your information in ways you would not reasonably expect. You have the right to object to any use based on legitimate interests, as explained under "Your rights".

We need your name, contact details and delivery address to fulfil an order. Without them, we cannot accept it.

We do not make decisions about you based solely on automated processing that have legal or similarly significant effects. Our payment provider may automatically decline a payment that its fraud checks flag. If that happens, contact us and we will help.

We send marketing emails, such as news of new ranges and offers, only if you have agreed to receive them, for example by signing up for our emails or ticking the box when you open an account.

You can stop them at any time, free of charge, by using the unsubscribe link in any marketing email or by emailing stuartslseng@gmail.com. Unsubscribing does not stop emails about your orders, which we need to send to fulfil them.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not pass it to other businesses for their own marketing.

We share information only where we need to, with organisations that must keep it secure and may use it only for the purpose we shared it for.

• Orbit Commerce, the platform our online shop runs on. It hosts the website, stores order, account and email sign-up records, sends emails such as order confirmations on our behalf and provides the visitor statistics described above. It acts as our processor, so it may use your information only on our instructions.
• The web company that set up and looks after our online shop, which can see order and customer records when it helps us run the shop. It acts as our processor.
• Stripe, our payment provider, which processes payments and carries out fraud checks. Stripe is also an independent controller of some payment information, for example to prevent fraud and meet its own legal duties, and has its own privacy policy. If you use another payment method offered at checkout, its provider receives the information it needs to process the payment.
• Our warehouse partner, its couriers and its installation teams. Your order is dispatched from our warehouse partner's UK warehouse. We share your name, delivery address, phone number, email address, the order details and any site access notes, so that they can deliver your order and, where booked, build or install it.
• hCaptcha, a service provided by Intuition Machines, Inc., which protects our forms from spam and bots. When you use a protected form, hCaptcha processes your IP address and information about your device and browser. Basis: our legitimate interests in stopping spam and automated abuse of our forms. You can read hCaptcha's privacy policy.
• Our email and IT providers. Our email is provided by Google, so emails you send us are held on Google's systems. The platform also uses a content delivery network to serve images and fonts, and an error reporting service that records technical faults, both of which process technical data such as IP addresses.
• Professional advisers we use, such as our accountant, solicitors and insurers, when we need their help.
• HMRC, other public authorities, regulators and the courts, when the law requires it, to help prevent fraud, or when we need to make, pursue or defend a legal claim.
• Anyone who takes over our business, or part of it, in a sale or reorganisation. They would be bound to treat your information as this policy describes.

We may also share statistics that cannot identify anyone.

Some of our service providers, such as Stripe, hCaptcha and Google, are based in or use servers in the United States or other countries outside the UK. Where personal information is transferred outside the UK, we make sure it is protected as UK law requires, for example because the UK has recognised the country as providing adequate protection (including the UK extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework for certified US companies), or because the provider has signed the International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses.

You can ask us for details of the safeguard that applies to a particular transfer.

We use cookies and browser storage that the shop needs in order to work, such as those that hold your basket and keep you signed in. Optional cookies, such as analytics or marketing cookies, are used only if you agree to them in our cookie banner. The platform's visitor statistics are explained separately in our Cookie policy, which also tells you how to change your choices.

• Orders, invoices and payment records: 6 years after the end of the financial year concerned, as tax and VAT rules require.
• Returns, complaints and claims: for as long as we need to deal with them, and up to 6 years after the contract ends in case of a legal claim.
• Your account: for as long as it stays open. When you ask us to close it, we remove or anonymise the account itself, while order records are kept for the period above.
• Enquiries, quotes and other correspondence: for as long as we need to deal with the matter and keep a record of what was agreed.
• Email sign-ups: until you unsubscribe. After that we keep a note that you unsubscribed, so that we do not email you again.
• Platform visitor statistics: page view records are kept for 90 days, after which only daily totals remain, and these cannot identify you.
• Security and technical logs: for as long as we need them to keep the website secure and fix faults.

When we no longer need information, we delete it or anonymise it so that it can no longer identify you.

Our safeguards include:

• encrypting the connection between your browser and our website, so information you send is protected in transit
• storing passwords only in hashed form
• leaving card payments to Stripe, so that we never hold your full card details
• limiting access to personal information to the people who need it
• requiring the organisations that handle information for us to keep it secure

No system is completely secure. You can help by choosing a strong password, not using it on any other website, and telling us straight away if you think someone else has used your account.

UK data protection law gives you these rights. You can:

• ask what we do with your information, which this policy sets out
• get a copy of the personal information we hold about you
• have it corrected if it is wrong or incomplete
• have it deleted where we have no good reason to keep it, although records the law makes us keep, such as invoices, are not covered
• limit how we use it, for example while we look into a concern you have raised
• object to uses based on our legitimate interests, and say no to direct marketing at any time, which we will always respect
• take your information with you, by receiving what you gave us in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, or having it sent to another organisation where that is technically possible
• withdraw consent whenever we rely on it. Anything we did before you withdrew it is not affected

To use any of these rights, email stuartslseng@gmail.com with "Data protection" in the subject line. There is no charge. We will reply within one month. If your request is complex, we may need up to two more months, and we will tell you if so.

Before acting on a request we may need proof of who you are, so that your information does not go to the wrong person. In some cases the law lets us, or requires us to, turn a request down, for example where we must keep certain records. We will tell you why if that happens.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first by emailing stuartslseng@gmail.com, so that we can try to put it right. We will acknowledge your complaint within 30 days and let you know the outcome.

You can also complain to the regulator for data protection in the UK:

Information Commissioner's Office (ICO)

• Address: Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF
• Helpline: 0303 123 1113
• Website: ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint

Links on our website may take you to other websites, which this policy does not cover. We are not responsible for how they handle your information, so please read their own privacy policies.

If we revise this policy, the "Last updated" date at the top will change. Where a revision makes a significant difference to how we use your information, we will let you know, for example by email.

The rules for using the website and buying from us are in our Terms and conditions.

SLS Engineering Supplies

• Address: Unit 1C, Inchmuir Road, Whitehill Industrial Estate, Bathgate, West Lothian EH48 2EP, United Kingdom
• Phone: 01506 639893
• Email: stuartslseng@gmail.com
• VAT number: GB703750065

You can also get in touch through our contact page.