Privacy Policy
Information we collect
Information you give us
When you place an order, we collect your name, billing address, shipping address, email address, and phone number. We also collect the contents of your order and any notes you add to it.
When you create an account, we collect your name, email address, and password, along with your saved addresses and order history.
When you contact us, we collect your name, email address, and whatever you choose to include in your message.
When you leave a product review, we collect your name, email address, and the content of your review. Your name and review are displayed publicly on the Site. Your email address is not. If you choose the option to save your details, your browser will store them so you don’t have to re-enter them next time.
When you sign up for our email list, we collect your email address and any name you provide. You can unsubscribe at any time using the link in any email we send.
Information we collect automatically
When you visit the Site, we automatically receive your IP address, browser type and version, operating system, device type, referring website, and the pages you view along with the dates and times of those visits. This is standard web server activity and happens on nearly every website.
If you consent to analytics cookies, we also collect information about how you interact with our pages — see Analytics and session recording below.
Payment information
We do not collect or store your card number. Payment card details are entered into a secure form hosted by our payment processor, Stripe, and are transmitted directly to Stripe. They do not pass through our servers and we never see them.
Stripe provides us with a record of the transaction — the amount, the date, whether it succeeded, and the last four digits and card brand for your reference and ours. Stripe also collects information about your device and browsing behavior on our checkout page in order to detect and prevent fraud. Stripe processes this information as an independent controller under its own privacy policy, available at https://stripe.com/privacy.
Analytics and session recording
We use Microsoft Clarity, a website analytics service from Microsoft, to understand how visitors use our store so we can find and fix problems.
Clarity records how you interact with our pages — including mouse movements, clicks, scrolling, and the pages you visit — and combines this into session recordings and heatmaps. This means we may be able to watch a playback of how a visit to our Site unfolded.
We take the following steps to limit what is captured:
- Clarity only runs if you consent. It is blocked by default and is not loaded unless you accept analytics cookies through our consent banner.
- Clarity sets cookies to recognize a returning visitor and to group page views into a single session. These are listed with their durations in the cookie notice below. We use them only for the analytics purposes described here, not for advertising.
Information collected by Clarity is processed by Microsoft in accordance with the Microsoft Privacy Statement.
You can withdraw your consent at any time using the cookie preferences control on our Site.
Order attribution
If you consent, we record how you arrived at our Site — for example, the search engine, link, or campaign that referred you — and associate it with any order you place. We use this to understand which of our marketing efforts bring in customers. This information is stored on our own systems and is not shared with advertisers.
Cookies
Details of the specific cookies used on this Site, what each one does, and how long it lasts are listed in the cookie notice below. You can change your preferences at any time.
We honor Global Privacy Control (GPC) signals. If your browser or an extension sends a GPC signal, we treat it as a request to opt out of non-essential tracking and apply it automatically.
How we use your information
We use the information described above to:
- Process your order, take payment, and arrange delivery
- Send you order confirmations, shipping notifications, and other transactional messages
- Respond to your questions and provide customer support
- Handle returns, exchanges, and refunds
- Detect, prevent, and investigate fraud and abuse
- Understand how our Site is used and improve it
- Keep records required for tax, accounting, and legal purposes
- Send marketing emails, where you have signed up to receive them
Who we share information with
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.
We share information with the following categories of service providers, only to the extent they need it to perform their work for us:
| Who | Why | Their policy |
|---|---|---|
| Stripe | Payment processing and fraud prevention | stripe.com/privacy |
| Microsoft (Clarity) | Website analytics, where you have consented | privacy.microsoft.com |
We may also disclose information where we are required to by law, in response to a valid legal request, or where necessary to protect our rights, your safety, or the safety of others.
If our business is sold or merged, customer information may transfer to the new owner as part of that transaction.
How long we keep information
- Account information: for as long as your account is open, and for 12 months after you close it
- Customer support messages: 2 years
- Product reviews: indefinitely, unless you ask us to remove them
- Session recordings (Clarity): Microsoft retains these for up to 30 days
Security
We use HTTPS encryption across the Site, and payment information is handled entirely by Stripe, which is certified to PCI Service Provider Level 1. We restrict access to customer information to people who need it to do their jobs.
No method of transmitting or storing data is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.
Children
Our Site is not directed at children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has given us information, contact us at info@thefinetea.com and we will delete it.
Where your information is held
We are based in the United States, our systems are located in the United States, and we ship only to addresses within the United States. We do not offer our products for sale or delivery outside the United States.
Some of our service providers, including Microsoft and Stripe, operate globally and may process information on servers outside the United States.
If you are browsing our Site from outside the United States, your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, where privacy laws may differ from those in your own country.