Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy helps you understand what personal information we collect, why we collect it, what we do with it and the choices you have, including how to access and update information.

Our Policy applies to you if you use our products or services in person, over the phone, online, through our mobile applications or if you use any of our websites or interact with us on social media (our “Services”).

Who We Are

MKMetals Ltd (referred to using "we", "us", "our" or the “Company”), a company registered in England and Wales (Company registration number: 15700136).

Information We Collect

We collect personal information about you when you visit our Company, use our websites, or if you communicate with us by phone, e-mail and social media. We refer to our websites as "Online Services".

The types of personal information we collect include:

Personal details such as your name, address, date of birth, email address, phone number and other contact information.
Transaction information, such as the product you purchased, its price, your method of payment and your payment details, which are anonymised as per Payment Card Industry Security Standards (PCI DSS).
Your account information, such as dates of payments owed and received, the services you use, or any other information related to your account.
The phone numbers that you use to contact us over the phone, such as contacting our customer services team.

When you're using our Online Services, the information we collect includes:

Account information, like your username, password, and other identifiers or credentials you use to access our Online Services or to buy our products and services, details of your shopping preferences, such as your favourite brands and products, as well as which of our stores you prefer to shop in. (Please note, when you log into your account you will remain logged in for 120 minutes, even if you leave our website. If you are using a shared computer, or do not want to remain logged in for this duration, please ensure you log out before leaving our website).
Information that you provide in your dealings with us. This includes when you register to use our Online Services, or when you subscribe to our services or request further services and/or information from us.
Details of your visits to our website and the resources that you access. Examples include ads that you click, device information and location.
IP address, type of device you are browsing from and cookie information.
If you interacted with our Online Services from an email we sent you we will have a record of that.

More information is available in our Cookie Policy

The situations when you provide personal information could include when you:

Purchase products at directly from our Company, online or through team.
Register or use our Online Services.
Request to receive marketing or other communications.
When you complete one of our customer surveys.
Submit information when you’re providing feedback or making an enquiry.
Use interactive features of our Online Services.

How We Use Your Information

Data protection law sets out a number of different lawful reasons for which a company may collect and process your personal information. These are:

Where we have entered into a contract with you;
Where we have your consent;
Where we are legally obligated to;
Where we have determined a legitimate interest that does not impact your rights and freedoms; and
Where it is in your vital interests to.

The information below provides examples of when we might rely on these lawful reasons:

Contract

We use your personal information to process your orders and payments or to give you a refund.
We enter into a contract with you when you use one of our services.
We will also process your personal details when we facilitate a contract between you and one of our partners.

Consent

We use email and text messages to communicate with you about our products and services, competitions, offers, promotions or special events.
To personalise your experience on our Online Services. This could include providing you with interesting, relevant content, or making navigation to our website easier (more information is available in our Cookie Policy).
To enter you into competitions.
To record if you have additional needs due to vulnerable circumstances or need extra support when communicating with us.
To participant in customer research activities carried out by MKMetals Ltd or agencies on our behalf such as interview, surveys and observations including the capture of images and videos.

Legitamate Interest

To provide customer support and to respond to, and communicate with you, about your requests.
To contact you if we need to obtain or provide additional information in relation to your order or query.
To check our records are right and to check every now and then that you’re happy and satisfied (e.g. customer surveys).
For marketing activities (other than where we rely on your consent), such as marketing permissions captured during the course of a sale and personalising marketing messages through social media and other third party platforms;
To monitor how our email marketing campaigns are performing and personalise email content towards you by monitoring email opens and what links, if any, you are clicking within the email.
To ensure that the emails we send cannot be ‘spoofed’ by fraudsters.
To send promotional material to you in the post or inform you of our offers by telephone
To comply with a request from you in connection with the exercise of your rights (for example where you have asked us not to contact you for marketing purposes, we will keep a record of this on our suppression lists in order to be able to comply with your request)
To send communications to you about your orders, purchases or accounts and bill you for using our products or services
To let you post on our blogs and interact with us through social media.
To ensure a smooth experience on our Online Services, including making sure our websites work correctly (more information is available in our Cookies Policy).
To help us understand more about you as a customer, the products and services you use, the way you use them and how you shop across the company, so we can serve you better
Improve the content and appearance of the website, and to make sure that content is presented in the most effective manner for you
To operate, evaluate and improve our business, including the development of new products and services; to determine the effectiveness of our sales, marketing and advertising; and the analysis and improvement of our products, offers, promotions, and Online Services and other technologies
To show you relevant ads by using information collected from your devices, if you have provided your consent for such collection, including your searches, location, ads that you have seen and personal information that you have given us, such as your age range, gender and topics of interest. Dependant on your ad settings, this information informs the ads that you see across your devices. So if you visit our website on your computer at work, you might see ads about our products or services on your phone later that night.
To facilitate an omnichannel journey to ensure that you can shop with us in any way that you choose.
Where you fail to repay what you owe us or return our property, we may need to trace your whereabouts (sometimes using a Tracing Agent) in order to recover payment or reclaim property. This might be carried out by a third party debt recovery agent on our behalf.
To protect against, identify and prevent fraud and other criminal activity, claims and other liabilities
For network and information security in order for us to take steps to protect your information against loss or damage, theft or unauthorised access.
To ensure the security and safety of our Company via CCTV.
To send you claim details as part of fulfilling promotional offers if you have made a qualifying purchase.
To help reduce the overall fraud and credit risk for our customers and ensure a duty of care for customers who apply for products and services.
To engage in the sale of anonymised sales and analytics data, ensuring that individuals cannot be identified from it. Anonymisation is performed using robust methods that comply with applicable data protection laws.

Legal Obligation

To identify you when you contact us
To verify the accuracy of information that we hold about you
To assist HMRC and/or the Police and/or other regulatory bodies in relation to an investigation by a public authority.
To complete any requests you make regarding your Data Subject Rights
For financial administration
Where necessary for health and safety purposes
To comply with our Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) obligations

Vital Interest

We may need to contact you if there are any urgent safety or product recall notices or where we otherwise reasonably believe that the processing of your personal information will prevent or reduce any potential harm to you.

Where we process your information under Legitimate Interest, we will have assessed this processing and balanced it against your rights and freedoms.

More Sensitive Information

Under data protection law, some personal information is considered more sensitive, including information relating to a person’s racial origins, certain beliefs or health conditions. It can also include information relating to criminal activity.

We do not expect to handle any of your more sensitive information unless it becomes relevant in our dealings with you or you volunteer the information. Examples of this might be where you have a vulnerability or health condition which is relevant to our dealings with you; where you are involved in a medical emergency or accident; if the information is relevant to a legal dispute or complaint; or while addressing criminality impacting our business. On the rare occasions we handle more sensitive information, we only do so as allowed by data protection law (for example, where we have your consent, to protect someone’s vital interests or to prevent or detect crime) or as required by law.

How We Use Your Information to Make Automated Decisions

We sometimes use systems to make automated decisions based on your personal information or the information we are allowed to collect from others about you or your business (for example where we perform credit or internal fraud checks). This helps us to make sure our decisions are quick, fair, efficient and correct, based on what we know. These automated decisions can affect the products, services or features we may offer you now or in the future, or the price that we charge you for them.

You have rights over automated decisions:

Under certain circumstances, you can ask that we do not make our decision based on the automated score alone; and
You can object to an automated decision and ask that a person reviews it.

If you want to know more about these rights, please contact us.

How We Use Information for Analysis

We analyse customer and transactional information to understand customer attitudes and propensity to act in a certain way in the future. We use algorithms to group customers into segments based on their socio-demographics, frequency of their interaction with MKMetals Ltd, size and type of their purchases, and feedback they provide via surveys.

We analyse customer information to:

Build new products and services or modify our services or Company environment to better meet customers’ expectations.
Design and deliver marketing campaigns, product and services recommendations that are relevant to you. This would be based on your past purchases, your online browsing behaviour or on what you have told us in surveys.
Develop product assortments based on types of customers, their preferences and shopping behaviour.
Develop commercial forecasts.
If you have provided consent, personalise your experience on our website.

We may also carry out analytics activities on information which has been fully anonymised.

Digital Advertising and Personalisation

We engage in advertising activity across all digital platforms with both targeted and non-targeted advertising. For targeted advertising, we may use information obtained through the use of cookies or similar technologies in your web browser to display ads to you, which you may see on other websites or digital platforms. Our website will seek your consent to deploy these kinds of cookies and similar technologies through our website cookies consent mechanism. More information is available in our Cookie Policy.

In order to ensure that appropriate ads are displayed, we work with partners and agencies (e.g. Epsilon) to analyse and prepare the information and measure the effectiveness of our advertising. This may include matching and combining pseudonymised offline data (such as transaction data) with pseudonymised online data (cookies) to create an online profile for you, based on your cookies preferences. See below the section on ‘Who we share your personal information with’. Where applicable, we or our advertising partners will combine this information with your transaction information and other information, such as your cookie consent instruction, interactions with our emails, and information from external or publicly available sources. By building a richer picture of your preferences in this way, we can make sure you see ads most relevant to you. We also use this information to ensure you do not receive unnecessary ads.

The digital advertising includes advertising across social media platforms. The media owners we most commonly work with are Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) and Google (which owns YouTube). The individual privacy policies are linked for your information.

We will also use the information we have on existing customers for modelling purposes, to help identify potential new customers who may be interested in our products.

Who We Share Your Personal Information With

We share personal information within MKMetals Ltd. Members of MKMetals Ltd that receive this information are not authorised to use or disclose the information except as provided in this Privacy Policy.

Where we share your information with any third parties, we will undertake due diligence prior to sharing any information with them and will have in place robust contracts that cover the security of any information shared.

Our service providers

We work with partners, suppliers, insurers and agencies so they can process your personal information on our behalf and only where they meet our standards on the processing of information and security. We only share information that helps them provide their services to us or to help them provide their services to you. For example, some of our service providers place advertising for us online, about our products and services and those of our suppliers and third parties. As a result, where you have indicated you are happy to receive online marketing from us in our cookie preference centre, you might see online advertising that we or our partners have placed on the websites you visit, or the interactive services you use.

Our third-party service providers include:

We share your information with financial institutions to improve levels of service, reduce risk and provide due duty of care to you and other customers.
Providers that we work with to deliver our marketing campaigns and facilitate our competitions
Manufacturers of products sold to our customers for whom we carry out repairs.
Companies that enable us to collect your reviews and comments, both online and offline, such as Feefo.
Companies that provide insights and analytics services for us so we can stock the right products, send the right marketing campaigns and understand our business and customers better.
Specialist providers of digital advertising and personalising content to provide customers with adverts tailored to them, such as Epsilon.
Partners that support our services, such as where we need to arrange a specialist engineer visit.
Companies that work on our behalf processing and sorting information, monitoring how customers use our websites, issuing our emails for us and collecting product/customer feedback from you via surveys.

Where you have asked us to deliver your purchases, we will also share your address and contact details with our delivery partners like DPD or Royal Mail, to ensure a successful delivery. These partners may contact you to provide periodic updates on your delivery.

Other organisations and individuals

We may also transfer your personal information to other organisations in certain scenarios. For example:

If required to by law, under any code or practice by which we are bound, or we’re asked to do so by a public or regulatory authority such as the Department for Work and Pensions.
To prevent and detect criminality impacting our business, we may voluntarily or on request share information with the Police or other crime prevention organisations, such as the National Business Crime Solution (NBCS). NBCS is a non-profit initiative that works with the Police and the business community to help tackle business crime in the UK by gathering and sharing information.
Information may also be shared with fraud prevention agencies to prevent fraudulent claims.
If we need to do so in order to exercise or protect our legal rights, users, systems and services.
With banks and insurance companies if you are a financial services (insurance or credit) customer.
In response to requests from individuals (or their representatives) seeking to protect their legal rights or the rights of others.
With emergency services (if you make an emergency call), including your approximate location.

How Long We Keep Your Personal Information

We will keep your personal information for as long as you're a customer. If you haven't made a purchase or engaged with us for 3 years or more, then we will remove you from our marketing mailing lists. After you stop being a customer, in most cases, we will keep your information for up to 7 years after the last time you interacted with us.

We may keep your information for longer than 7 years if we cannot delete it for legal, regulatory or technical reasons. We may also need to keep it in order to help support product recalls or safety notices. If we do, we will make sure that your privacy is protected and only use it for those purposes.

We do not retain personal information in an identifiable format for longer than is necessary.

Your Rights

Below outlines the Data Protection Rights available to you:

Access to information held about you

You have the right to request what personal information we hold about you. This is sometimes called a 'Data Subject Access Request'. If we agree that we are obliged to provide personal information to you (or someone else on your behalf), we will provide it to you free of charge. Before providing personal information to you or another person on your behalf, we may ask for proof of identity and sufficient information about your interactions with us so that we can locate your personal information. Except in rare cases, we will respond to you within 30 days after we have received this information or, where no such information is required, after we have received your request. You can request a copy of your information using the contact details below.

Rectify information held about you

If any of the personal information we hold about you is inaccurate or out of date, you may ask us to correct it.

Data portability

In certain circumstances you have the right to request a copy of your personal information from us or to have that information passed to an organisation of your choice in a format that can be easily re-used.

To stop or limit our processing of your information

You have the right to object to us processing your personal information if we are not entitled to use it anymore, to have your information deleted if we are keeping it too long or have its processing restricted in certain circumstances.

Where we rely on our legitimate interests, as set out under 'How we use your information', you may object to us using it for these purposes. If we agree that your objection is justified in accordance with your rights under data protection laws, we will permanently stop using your information for those purposes. Otherwise, we will provide you with our justification as to why we need to continue using your information.

You can ask us to restrict the use of your personal information if:

Please note that we may be required by law to retain certain information. Before we are able to provide you with any information or correct any inaccuracies, we may ask you provide other details to help us respond to your request.

It isn't accurate.
It has been used unlawfully but you don't want us to delete it.
It is not relevant anymore, but you want us to keep it for use in legal claims.
You have already asked us to stop using your information but you are waiting for us to tell you if we are allowed to keep on using it.

Erasure

You have the right to request erasure of your personally identifiable information (also known as the right to be forgotten). In some circumstances we may not be able to fully delete your information, for example where we have an overriding legal obligation to retain it, and where we can delete it, we will need to keep an appropriate record of the request.

If you would like to exercise any of these rights, please contact us.

How Can You Stop the Use of Your Personal Information for Direct Marketing

We won't send you direct marketing messages if you tell us not to. You can tell us in a number of ways:

You can click on the "unsubscribe" link in any communication that we send to you by email, which will automatically unsubscribe you from those channels of communication. Please also note that you will continue to receive any Service communications we need to send in relation to the product and services we have sold to you.
To stop online marketing through cookies please see our Cookie Policy.
If you are seeing marketing from us through your social media channels you can stop these directly within the social media site.

Security Measures

We take our responsibility to protect your information very seriously. MKMetals Ltd use physical, technical and organisational security measures to protect the personal information supplied by you against loss, destruction, and any unauthorised access by third parties. We do this in several ways which include, but is not limited to:

Adhering to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guidelines when collecting, processing and storing information.
Using encryption protocols and software to protect your personal information during transmission.
Carrying out regular back-ups of our critical information.
Regular testing and evaluation of our security measures.

Contact Us

If you would like to access any of your rights as listed above, or have any questions with regards to this Policy, please use the contact us section of our website.

You can also contact the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) if you have any concerns or complaints with how MKMetals Ltd has handled your personal information: https://ico.org.uk/global/contact-us/

This Privacy Policy was last updated January 2024 and replaces all previous versions. This Policy is regularly reviewed and if updates and changes are made we may notify you either by email or with an announcement on social channels.