Cookies

Cookies in use on the Alpha Laboratories website

Cookies and how they benefit you

Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can.
Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites.

Our cookies help us to:

  • Make our website work as you'd expect

  • Save you having to re-enter information every time you visit the site

  • Remember your settings during and between visits

  • Improve the speed and security of the site

  • Allow you to share pages with colleagues and social networks like Facebook and Twitter

  • Personalise our site for you to help you get what you need faster

  • Continuously improve our website for you

  • Analyse our web traffic and customer joirneys using an analytics package

  • Make our marketing more efficient (ultimately helping us to offer the service we do at the price we do)

We do not use cookies to:

  • Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)

  • Collect any sensitive information

  • Pass data to advertising networks

  • Pass personally identifiable data to third parties

  • Pay sales commissions

You can learn more about all the cookies we use below.

Granting us permission to use cookies

If the settings on your software that you are using to view this website (your browser) are adjusted to accept cookies we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you accept this.
Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.

Website Function Cookies

We use cookies to make our website work including:

  • Making our shopping basket and checkout work

  • Determining if you are logged in or not

  • Remembering where you are located so that you see relevant localised products and content

  • Remembering your search settings

  • Tailoring content to your needs

  • Remembering if you have accepted our terms and conditions

  • Showing you which pages you have recently visited

  • Allowing you to add comments to our site

There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.

Third party functions

Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video. Our site includes the following which use cookies. Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties

Social Website Cookies

So you can easily ‘like’ or share our content on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter we have included sharing buttons on our site.
Cookies are set by:

  • AddThis – which provides us with lots of sharing buttons all in one neat package

The privacy implications on this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.

Anonymous Visitor Statistics Cookies

We use Google Analytics which uses cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our site isn't working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. Google Analytics also tell us, on an anonymous basis, how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before helping us to put more money into developing our services for you instead of marketing spend.

Specifically, Google Analytics uses cookies to define user sessions, as well as to provide a number of key features in the Google Analytics reports. Google Analytics sets or updates cookies only to collect data required for the reports. Additionally, Google Analytics uses only first-party cookies. This means that all cookies set by Google Analytics for your domain send data only to the servers for your domain. This effectively makes Google Analytics cookies the personal property of this website domain, and the data cannot be altered or retrieved by any service on another domain.

Marketing Cookies

If you have previously provided us with your email address these are used to recognise you when you return to our website. This enables us to personalise our content for you, greet you by name and remember your preferences. These cookies also record your visit to our website, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. We will use this information to make our website, the advertising displayed on it and communications sent more relevant to your interests.

Turning Cookies Off

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. Doing so however will limit the functionality of both our website as well as a large proportion of the world's other websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.

Information on deleting cookies or controlling cookies is available at www.aboutCookies.org.

To reiterate though, by deleting our cookies or disabling future cookies you may not be able to access certain areas or features of our site.

If your concerns around cookies relate to so-called "spyware", rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive. Learn more about managing cookies with antispyware software.