The Tea Trove is committed to protecting the privacy of visitors to this site (the "Site"). At www.theteatrove.com, we want you to have an enjoyable shopping experience. And while it is necessary for us to collect certain personal information, we respect and protect your right to privacy as set forth in this Privacy Policy. This Privacy Policy applies to the Site. This Privacy Policy does not apply to other web sites to which we link.
Note:
- Our privacy policy is subject to change at any time without notice. To make sure you are aware of any changes, please review this policy periodically.
- By visiting www.theteatrove.hohtechlabs.com you agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree please do not use or access our Website.
- By mere use of www.theteatrove.hohtechlabs.com, you expressly consent to our use and disclosure of your personal information in accordance with this Privacy Policy. This Privacy Policy is incorporated into and subject to the Terms of Use.
Information Collected
To complete an order, our visitors must share with us contact information (name, e-mail and shipping address) and billing information (credit card number and expiration date). This information is used to create an account to process and ship your orders.
We invite visitors to subscribe to our newsletter, and ask for e-mail contact information to assist in its distribution. All customers receive updates of new issues automatically. Should you wish to not receive these, you may easily opt-out. Please see Choice/Opt-Out section for more info.
We invite our customers to submit reviews of the products they have purchased earlier. This information is then displayed on our site to aid other visitors' shopping experience. These submissions are always voluntary, and the only personal information requested is customer's name.
We invite our customers to mail friends an introductory free $4 gift-certificate. This is meant to encourage a visit to our store. To facilitate this, we ask for the name and e-mail address of the recipient. This information is used to electronically mail a unique certificate code, keep track and assure an accurate credit of 10 points at the time of the purchase. This information is not traded or shared with any third parties.
Our customers will occasionally receive information on products, services, special deals, and a newsletter. Out of respect for the privacy of our customers we present the option to not receive these types of communications. Please see the Choice/Opt-out section below.
On rare occasions it may be necessary to send out a strictly service-related announcement. For instance, if our service is temporarily suspended for maintenance we might send you an email. Generally, users may not opt-out of these communications. However, these communications are not promotional in nature, and are extremely infrequent.
A cookie is a piece of personal account data stored on the customer's hard drive containing info that will enhance the enjoyment of our site. For example, a cookie containing a record of past orders provides such useful features as an opportunity to easily reorder or refill any of our teas, and post reviews of the items previously purchased, as well as receive recommendation of the items we feel you will particularly enjoy.
You may control whether your computer will accept cookies (from TheTeaTrove - The Online Tea Store) with the preference setting of your browser. If your browser is set to reject cookies, you may still visit and shop at our site. The only drawback is that some of the experience-enhancing features listed above will not be active.
Logs are the information created and stored by the server and include such data as a visitor's IP (internet protocol) address, browser type, ISP (internet service provider), referring/exit pages, platform type, and date/time stamp. This information is used to analyze macro traffic trends, administer the site, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. None of the information collected in this matter may be used to ascertain the personal identity of any of our visitors.
How We Use Your Information
We will not share or disclose your information to anyone except as described in this Privacy Policy.
We use personally identifiable information in order to give you a more enjoyable, convenient shopping experience and to help us identify and/or provide information, products or services that may be of interest to you. We use your personally identifiable information to support and enhance your use of the Site and its features, including without limitation: fulfilling your order; providing customer service; tracking email invitations you send; and otherwise supporting your use of the Site and its features. We may also track your past purchases to provide you with a personalized profile of your shopping history. In addition, we may notify you about new services or special promotional programs, or send you offers or information.
We may permit certain trusted third parties to access your information in connection with their performance of services to maintain and operate the Site and certain features on the Site. For example, we may use third parties to host the Site; operate various features available on the Site; send emails; analyze data; provide search results and links and assist in fulfilling your orders.
From time to time, we may share your personally identifiable information in connection with strategic relationships. Some of these strategic relationships may include operating a co-branded website or web pages with a strategic partner. You should be aware that these co-branded sites may collect different or additional information. Additionally, we may provide links on our Site to websites controlled by third parties. We have no control over these websites and our privacy policy does not apply to these third party websites. Please consult the privacy policy of the website you are visiting.
Also, we may share personally identifiable or other information with our parent, subsidiaries, divisions, and affiliates.
Occasionally, we provide our postal mailing list (consisting of customer names and postal mailing addresses, but not email addresses) to other companies whose products we believe may be of interest to you. In order to determine those products that we believe may be of interest to you, the information that you give us and information about your order may be combined with other personally identifiable information (such as demographic information and past purchase history) available from our records and other sources.
We may transfer personally identifiable information as an asset in connection with a proposed or actual merger or sale (including any transfers made as part of an insolvency or bankruptcy proceeding) involving all or part of our business or as part of a corporate reorganization, stock sale or other change in control.
We reserve the right to disclose information in order to comply with a subpoena, court order, administrative or governmental order, or any other requirement of law, or when we, in our sole discretion, believe it is necessary in order to protect our rights or the rights of others, to prevent harm to persons or property, to fight fraud and credit risk reduction.
We use non-personally identifiable information in the aggregate, so that we can improve the Site and for business and administrative purposes. We may also use or share with third parties for any purpose aggregated data that contains no personally identifiable information.
How We Protect Your Information
We are committed to protecting the information we receive from you. We follow reasonable technical and management practices to help protect the confidentiality, security and integrity of data stored on our system. While no computer system is completely secure, we believe the measures we have implemented reduce the likelihood of security problems to a level appropriate to the type of data involved.
The Site encrypts your credit card number and other personal information using secure socket layer (SSL) technology to provide for the secure transmission of the information from your PC to our servers. In addition, only those employees and third parties who need access to your information in order to perform their duties are allowed such access.
Accessing and Updating Your Personal Information and Preferences
If you are a registered user, you may access and update your registration information and your preferences to receive email or other communications from us by sending an email to contact@theteatrove.hohtechlabs.com or visiting to account page. Please note that your friends and contacts may still choose to send email invitations to you. Any user who receives an email invitation to join the Site may choose not to receive such invitations in the future by following the instructions in the email invitations and, in addition, if you are a member, you may also choose not to receive such invitations by changing your preferences as indicated above. We will take commercially reasonable steps to implement your opt-out requests promptly, but you may still receive communications from us for up to ten business days as we process your request.While we make efforts to accommodate requests to restrict our use of your information, we reserve the right to delete all or any portion of customer information if we are not able to reasonably accommodate a requested restriction.