oozlumgames.com

If there’s one thing guaranteed to make customers snooze it’s a piece on new EU privacy legislation, especially one for which all the official information is poorly explained as to its effects on small businesses and customers. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which comes into effect on 25 May 2018, excels at being especially obfuscatory and confusing.

Fighting 15s has slightly tweaked its privacy policy at https://www.fighting15sshop.co.uk/privacy.asp to suit the new laws.

In short, because Fighting 15s does not ask and has never asked customers to sign up for direct marketing (email newsletters, promotions, and such), and does not engage in direct marketing, the GDPR has minimal effect.

The GDPR requires businesses to get customers to confirm that they want to receive direct marketing by actively ticking a check box consenting to such marketing. Fighting 15s does not send out direct marketing, and therefore there is no check box on the website in the checkout process. Our webshop provider does offer direct marketing tools but we have not signed up to them.

Fighting 15s holds essential information for the processing of customers’ orders: name, address, email and phone, plus the system will record the IP address used when placing the order. Obviously we need name, address and contact details so we can send out orders, confirmation emails, fulfil our legal obligations to provide a durable copy of the current terms and conditions, and to contact a customer in the event of questions about an order. The IP address is required in the event of digital product sales to help prove the origin of an order for VAT liability.

Customers who do not want such information held on record may request its deletion by simply emailing or writing to Fighting 15s, and we will remove it from the shop (the GDPR doesn’t seem to have considered a requirement for proof that the person emailing to have such information deleted is actually that person, but it would seem sensible). However, Fighting 15s is legally required to hold customers’ essential information for six years for tax/accountancy purposes, and therefore we can delete only what is historic information – currently information obtained before 6 April 2010, the start of the 2010-2011 accountancy year, because the last tax year for while Fighting 15s has filed a return is 2016-2017.

We don’t record other information about customers. We have no idea what wargames periods you prefer, other than by general patterns of your orders, or of any other interests, penchants or peccadilloes. The privacy policy is a general purpose document that allows us to know these things in the event that we have customers’ permission to collect them.

Financial information is handled by third-party processors, so we never see payment details if customers place and pay for orders through the online shop. Our payment processors are PayPal and Barclaycard.

Our preferred means of passing on news is via Facebook and our WordPress blogs (Fighting 15s news and oozlumgames.com). If you don’t want to see what we do on Facebook, unlike and unfollow the Fighting 15s page (https://www.facebook.com/Fighting15s/). The power to sign out of following a WordPress blog remains solely with the follower: WordPress site administrators do not, repeat do not, have the power to delete followers. Details of how to unfollow a WordPress blog may be found at https://en.support.wordpress.com/following/.

Of course, non-EU businesses that record details of EU customers are supposed to adopt the GDPR. As with reporting VAT on digital products, Fighting 15s by and large cannot see businesses outside the EU conforming. Except the UK after Brexit. Good old law-abiding Blighty will be the only country that conforms to a law that also encompasses Martians and Venusians should they start direct marketing to the people of the EU.

In summary, Fighting 15s’ policy remains as it always has been: we won’t bug you by sending out a relentless stream of marketing drivel. If you want drivel, you have to come to us…

As Fighting 15s’  Facebook followers will be aware, I have been playing with a redesign of the Fighting 15s website to bring it kicking and screaming out of the early 2000s and into the 20-teens. That redesign is now live.

There is no maintenance mode for the site, so this change was enacted live on Saturday afternoon. I had warned in advanced on Facebook that some odd pictures might appear, but those should now all be gone. Not that anyone would pay heed to the fact that I’d adapted a fashion website, nor that pictures of people in underwear would be unusual on some wargames websites…

I emphasise that the navigation of the website has not changed – it just looks different. It still works the same way, using a hierarchical system to categorise figures. I am still working on streamlining this, as evidenced by the new AB Figures Quick Codes section, which will eventually roll out to other product ranges. I still need to add images to most of the navigational aspects of the new site, which should help customers find their way around by providing more visual clues.

New features that I had been trying out on the old website, such as the ability to sort products by various criteria, as well as a login system to check on order progress, are obviously still available on the new site. The new site provided the motivation to add these in the first place.

Products now have even more information available about them. The short product listing now contains details of pack contents to stop customers asking what every code contains – this simply shows that customers treated the website as a code list without going that extra step to click on a product to see the full description. The new product description pages are clearer and the ability to email product details to friends or print them off is now available.

The site now has a privacy policy. The old site needed one but the limited allocation of webpages simply didn’t allow it. The Fighting 15s policy is very different from most others because I regard email marketing as the scourge of the internet. Therefore, quite simply, Fighting 15s will not use customers’ details to send out newsletters, conduct marketing, or send out information to third parties. I believe customers will simply come back to the Fighting 15s site because the products we sell are good and do not need aggressive marketing to sell them, and because Fighting 15s will not pelt customers with sales literature just because all they wanted was a few packs of unique figures.

This is, however, stage one. I am evaluating other ecommerce providers that offer better search options for a shop, with the ability to filter products. However, any change will not happen for a long time.

Ian
Fighting 15s