Privacy policy

Who we are

Towsons Limited ("Towsons", "we", "us") is a company registered in England & Wales under company number 8117825, of Unit 3, 202 Pershore Road South, Birmingham, B30 3EU, United Kingdom. We design, print and sell products under our own brands, including WeDoMugs. We are the controller of the personal information described in this policy. You can contact us about it at [email protected] or at the address above.

What this policy covers

• this website, www.towsons.com;
• orders placed with our brands, wherever they are bought (our own shops and marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, Etsy and TikTok Shop);
• the Towsons portal, our internal business system, including the "Towsons" app it uses to connect to Google services on our behalf (see "Google user data" below).

Each of our shops and the marketplaces we sell on may also publish its own privacy notice for the parts of an order it handles.

Information we collect and why

Customers. When you order one of our products we receive your name, delivery address, email address or phone number where given, the items ordered, any personalisation text you enter, and the order's payment status (we do not receive or store card numbers). We use this to make, dispatch and deliver your order, to answer your questions, and to handle returns and refunds. Our lawful basis is performing our contract with you.

Messages. If you contact us by email, by WhatsApp, or through a marketplace's messaging, we keep the conversation so we can answer you and refer back to it. Our lawful basis is our legitimate interest in helping our customers.

Website visitors. This website uses only the cookies it needs to work. The WhatsApp button on this website opens a chat with us in WhatsApp, which is provided by WhatsApp (part of Meta) under its own privacy policy; nothing is sent to WhatsApp unless you press it. The map on our contact page is provided by Google Maps, which receives your IP address when it loads.

Suppliers and business contacts. We keep the names, work contact details and correspondence of the people we do business with, to run that business relationship (legitimate interest) and to meet our accounting and tax obligations (legal obligation).

Google user data

The Towsons portal is used only by Towsons staff, to run Towsons' own business. It is not offered to the public or to other businesses. When a member of our staff connects the portal to Google, Google asks them to allow our app, "Towsons", to access the following, using their Google account:

• Your email address (openid, email) — to show which Google account is connected.
• Google Ads (https://www.googleapis.com/auth/adwords) — to read the performance and search terms of Towsons' own advertising campaigns, to look up keyword search volumes and competition for our own products, and to manage our own campaigns.
• Google Merchant Center (https://www.googleapis.com/auth/content) — to send our own product listings to Google, and to read Merchant Center reports about them: best sellers in our product categories, how our prices compare, and which shops compete with ours.
• Google Search Console (https://www.googleapis.com/auth/webmasters.readonly, read only) — to read which Google searches found the pages of our own websites.

How we use it. Only to run Towsons' own business: to manage our own advertising and product listings, to see which searches find our products, and to write better titles and descriptions for our own listings. We do not use Google user data for advertising to individuals, we do not sell it, and we do not use it to build profiles of people.

How we store it. The connection's tokens are stored encrypted on our own servers in the United Kingdom. Reports read from Google (search terms, keyword figures and the like, about our own business) are stored in our own database on those servers for as long as they are useful to our business.

Who we share it with. We do not share Google user data with anyone, except service providers who process it only on our behalf and under contract to provide these features to us: our hosting, and the AI service we use to draft listing text from search terms. They may not use it for any other purpose, including to train their own models.

Limited Use. Towsons' use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Removing access. The connection can be removed at any time from the portal, or from your Google account at myaccount.google.com/permissions. When it is removed from the portal, its tokens are revoked with Google and deleted from our servers; you can ask us at [email protected] to delete the reports read through it as well.

Who we share personal information with

Only those who help us fulfil an order or run our business: delivery carriers (such as Royal Mail), the marketplace or shop platform an order was placed on, payment providers, our IT and hosting providers, and our professional advisers. We share only what each needs, and we never sell personal information.

Transfers outside the UK

Some of our service providers process information outside the United Kingdom. Where they do, we rely on the safeguards UK data protection law provides, such as adequacy regulations or the International Data Transfer Agreement.

How long we keep it

Order and accounting records are kept for six years after the end of the financial year they relate to, as UK tax law requires. Messages are kept for as long as they are useful to answer you and handle any later question about your order. When we no longer need personal information we delete it or make it anonymous.

Your rights

You have the right to ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to how we use it, and to have it given to you in a portable form. Contact us at [email protected]. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Changes to this policy

We will post any changes on this page and change the date at the top.