Privacy Policy
Introduction
This website is owned and operated by The Vermont Country Store. This Privacy Policy describes the ways we may collect, use and share (“process”) any information which relates to individuals who visit this website (www.vermontcountrystore.com) or individuals who provide us with information or about whom we receive information as part of the Services we provide. This Privacy Policy is effective July 1, 2024.
The Vermont Country Store may be contacted by email at customerservice@vermontcountrystore.com, by phone at 1-802-776-5644, or by mail at:
The Vermont Country Store
401 Innovation Drive
Attention: Personal Data Request
North Clarendon, VT 05759
If you are a Connecticut resident, additional rights you may have are described in detail below. You can download a PDF version of this document here.
Information We Collect
We collect and use personal information for our legitimate business purposes, such as to:
- Process, track, and fulfill your orders
- Market our products and services
- Inform you of special offers and promotions
- Include you in surveys and contests
- Manage and develop The Vermont Country Store's business and operations
- Contact you for any other legitimate business purpose
Information may be collected directly from you when you provide it to us, may be collected passively through our website or an email we send to you, or may be obtained from third parties. We may combine information obtained from any of these sources.
Information You Provide. We may collect information directly from you in connection with your use of this website, or purchase of products from The Vermont Country Store. This Personal Information may include the following:
- Name
- Mailing Address
- Email Address
- Telephone number
- Payment information, such as credit or debit card number, expiration date, and CVV code
- Payment history
- Internet or other electronic network activity
- Age range
- Gender
This information is used to provide you with services and products you request. For example, we use your payment and shipping information to process, track and deliver purchases you make from our website. We will use your email address to communicate with you about your order, and to send you marketing emails. You may correct personal information you have provided to us, including your contact information, by contacting customer service. You may also create a customer account with us, and can update your information by logging into the account and making the changes to your profile.
Information that is automatically collected. Certain information about site usage is collected automatically – by cookies, pixel tags, scripts or similar technologies – when you visit our site or open an email that we send. This information may include operating system, device ID, IP address, referring domain, and pages visited. This information is tracked in server logs, and may be used for troubleshooting purposes, or to personalize your experience. Our website also collects aggregate information, such as page views and visits, in an effort to keep our content relevant to our customers.
Information is also collected by cookies, beacons or similar technologies placed by third parties with whom we have contracted. For example, we use Google Analytics to help us understand and improve our website visitor’s experience, and we work with vendors to target our advertising to audiences we think will be most interested in our products. To learn more about cookies, pixel tags, interest-based advertising and your choices, please see the section below.
Information from third parties. We also obtain information from third parties, such as address verification services, data brokers and credit reporting agencies. We use this information to improve the effectiveness of our website and marketing efforts, and to improve the quality of the data we use in our business.
During the past twelve months, we have collected personal information about consumers, including identifiers such as a real name, alias, postal address, unique personal identifier, online identifier Internet Protocol address, email address, or other similar identifiers; categories of personal information described in subdivision (e) of Section 1798.80 of the Cal. Civil Code; commercial information, including records of personal property, products, or services purchased, obtained, or considered, or other purchasing or consuming histories or tendencies; Internet or other electronic network activity information, including, but not limited to, browsing history, search history, and information regarding a consumer's interaction with an Internet Web site, application, or advertisement; and education information, defined as information that is not publicly available personally identifiable information as defined in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (20 U.S.C. section 1232g, 34 C.F.R. Part 99).
During the past twelve months, we have sold or shared personal information about consumers, including identifiers such as a real name, alias, postal address, unique personal identifier, online identifier Internet Protocol address, email address, or other similar identifiers; categories of personal information described in subdivision (e) of Section 1798.80 of the Cal. Civil Code; commercial information, including records of personal property, products, or services purchased, obtained, or considered, or other purchasing or consuming histories or tendencies; Internet or other electronic network activity information, including, but not limited to, browsing history, search history, and information regarding a consumer's interaction with an Internet Web site, application, or advertisement; and education information, defined as information that is not publicly available personally identifiable information as defined in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (20 U.S.C. section 1232g, 34 C.F.R. Part 99).
Vermont Country Store does not collect sensitive personal information or sensitive data, as such is defined in state privacy laws, including those in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Utah, and Virginia.
How We Share Information
- Service Providers. We may share your information with service providers where necessary to complete a transaction you have requested. For example, when you make a purchase, payment processors and shippers will have access to your payment and shipping information.
- IT Service Providers. We share information with Service Providers in order to operate, understand and improve our website. We may share information (including unique identifiers) with third-party advertising and analytics platforms as described below.
- Marketing Service Providers. In order to more effectively market our products, we contract with Service Providers that provide marketing services (including email, display and direct mail marketing, data enhancement, printing, data and marketing analytics, and campaign creation and analytics).
- Third Party Marketers. From time to time we may exchange our customer lists with other reputable companies whose products we think may be of interest to you. We also may share information with third-parties such as cooperative marketing databases that allow participants to mutually enhance the way they target customers and prospective customers. Data sharing for marketing purposes, and your choices regarding these activities, are described further below.
- Where necessary to comply with the law. We may share any information when we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary in order to protect our rights or to comply with any judicial or administrative proceeding, court or governmental order, or legal process served on us, such as a subpoena. We may also share information when we believe in good faith that such sharing is necessary to prevent fraud or other illegal activity, or to prevent harm.
- Corporate Asset Transactions. We may sell, buy, merge or partner with other companies or businesses, or sell some or all of our assets. In such transactions, any information we hold may be among the transferred assets, and may be shared during due diligence leading up to any transfer.
- Consent. We may share information about you in any other circumstance in which we have your consent, or in order to provide you with a service you have requested.
Cookies, Tracking Pixels, and Interest-Based Advertising
We use cookies, pixels and similar technologies to personalize your website experience, to better understand our customers’ preferences, and to more effectively target our marketing efforts.
A Cookie is a small data file stored by your Web browser on your computer's hard drive. Cookies allow The Vermont Country Store website to keep track of your order information, such as items placed in your Shopping Bag. Cookies also allow us to provide customers with a more personalized experience.
Tracking Pixels are small images that are used by the website to identify pages that are being viewed by customers. No personal data is collected when these images are viewed. Aggregate data from Tracking Pixels is used to improve the customer experience. We work with third-party advertising platforms to place advertising, which may be through display, email, direct mail or other methods. These third party platforms use technologies like cookies and tracking pixels to serve ads for The Vermont Country Store, or for other advertisers based on past visits to our Site and other sites, or on other information about you; to report on the placement of those ads; and to analyze website visits and advertising performance. This type of advertising, in which browsing behavior over time and across sites is analyzed to serve more timely and relevant advertising, is known as interest-based advertising. When we work with third party advertising and analytics platforms, we or they may place cookies (or similar technologies) that have been associated with de-identified demographic or other data linked to or derived from data you have voluntarily submitted to us and that we may share with a service provider to trigger or suppress an ad. Using these and other identifiers, service providers we work with may target, measure, or analyze advertising to you delivered through a variety of channels, including internet display advertising, email marketing and direct mail marking.
We work with third-party advertising service providers to provide cross-channel and cross-device marketing, in which Information that we or they collect through one device or method of marketing may be associated with other information to allow us to market to you through another device or channel. For instance, if you visit our website or make a purchase, we may use information such as your email or IP address to send offers to you on a mobile device we think you are using, or to send you a direct mail catalog.
Your Choices
Interest-based advertising. To learn more about interest-based advertising, and to opt-out of seeing such advertising, you may visit the consumer opt-out links of the Network Advertising Initiative and the Digital Advertising Alliance, at the following links;
http://www.aboutads.info/choices or http://networkadvertising.org/choices.
Opting-out of interest-based advertising through the above links does not mean you will not see advertising, it only means that the ads you see will not be personalized based on your browsing activities, based on a cookie that the NAI or DAA will place on your browser. Because the NAI or DAA opt-out relies on cookies, blocking or deleting cookies may interfere with the effectiveness of an opt-out request
Mobile Advertising Choices. We may sometimes serve interest-based ads through mobile apps. Each operating system (e.g. iOS and Android) provides its own instructions on how to prevent the delivery of interest-based ads. To learn more about this, please visit the privacy settings for the applicable device or operating system.
Choices regarding direct marketing from The Vermont Country Store. If you no longer wish to receive our catalogs, please send your name and address as it appears on your mailing label to: The Vermont Country Store, P.O. Box 6998, Rutland, VT 05702-6998; email us at customerservice@vermontcountrystore.com; or call us at 1-800-211-4741. If you wish to stop receiving marketing emails from us, you may unsubscribe by clicking the link included with every commercial email.
Choices regarding direct marketing by third-parties. If you do not wish for your information to be made available to third parties for their direct marketing use, through the rental or exchange of customer lists or cooperative databases, you may opt-out of such sharing by clicking here, or by contacting customer service. You may also opt out of all direct mail by registering with the Data Marketing and Analytics, formerly the Direct Marketing Association, at https://dmachoice.thedma.org/
Choices regarding third-party analytics. We utilize Google Analytics to help us assess the effectiveness of our website and marketing. You can learn more about how Google uses data when you use their partner's sites or apps, and your choices about that use, here: https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/.
We honor Global Privacy Control (GPC) settings.
Children's Privacy
Our Web site is not intended for use by children under the age of 16, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under the age of 16. We also do not send email correspondence to anyone who tells us they are under the age of 16 without the consent of a parent or guardian.
Connecticut Privacy Rights
As described above, we collect various types of personal information about you during the course of our customer relationship. If you are a Connecticut resident, Connecticut law provides you with certain rights regarding your personal information. This section describes the rights of Connecticut consumers and how to exercise them.
- You have the right to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information. You have the right to direct us not to share data for purposes of cross-context behavioral marketing, and the right to opt out of the processing of personal data for purposes of targeted advertising. You may click on the “Your Privacy Choices” Link on our homepage to exercise your right to opt-out, or you may call or write us as directed below. If exercised, the decision to opt-out will be valid for 12 months, at which time we may request that you authorize the sale of personal information again.
- You have the right to request that we disclose certain information to you about our collection and use of your personal information over the past twelve months. Once we receive and verify your request, we will disclose to you upon request:
- The categories of personal information we collected about you.
- The categories of sources from which the personal information is collected.
- The specific pieces of personal information we collected about you.
- Our business or commercial purpose for collecting or selling any personal information.
- The purposes for which the information we collected will be used.
- The categories of third parties with whom we share personal information.
- If we sold or disclosed your personal information for a business purpose; and, if so, any categories of personal information that were sold or disclosed, and the categories of any third parties to whom personal information was sold or disclosed.
- You have the right to request that we delete any of your personal information that we collected from you and retained, subject to certain exceptions. Once we receive and verify your request, we will delete (and direct our service providers to delete) upon request your personal information from our records, unless an exception applies. Further, we will notify any third parties with whom we have shared such personal information and instruct those third parties to comply with the deletion request.
- We may deny your deletion request if retaining the information is necessary for us or our service providers to:
- Complete the transaction for which we collected the personal information, provide a good or service that you requested, take actions reasonably anticipated within the context of our ongoing business relationship with you, or otherwise perform our agreement with you.
- Detect security incidents, protect against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity, or prosecute those responsible for such activities.
- Debug products to identify and repair errors that impair existing intended functionality.
- Exercise free speech, ensure the right of another consumer to exercise their free speech rights, or exercise another right provided for by law.
- Enable internal uses that are reasonably aligned with consumer expectations based on your relationship with us.
- Comply with a legal obligation.
- Make other internal and lawful uses of that information that are compatible with the context in which you provided it.
- You have the right to correct any inaccurate personal information that we have collected from you. Once we receive and verify your request, we will correct (and direct our service providers to correct) upon request your personal information in our records. You may click on the “Your Privacy Choices” Link on our homepage to exercise your right to opt-out, or you may call or write us as directed below.
- You have the right to limit the use and disclosure of any sensitive personal information that we have collected from you. Once we receive and verify your request, we will limit the use and disclosure (and direct our service providers to limit the use and disclosure) upon request your sensitive personal information in our records, unless an exception applies.
- We may deny your request to limit the use and disclosure of sensitive personal information if it is necessary for us or our service providers to provide a service or deliver a product that you have specifically requested.
If you are a Connecticut resident and would like to exercise your rights under Connecticut law, please mail a written request, email us, call our toll-free telephone number, or use our online form at Your Privacy Choices
You may make one of the foregoing requests by contacting us by email at customerservice@vermontcountrystore.com, by phone at 1-802-776-5644, or by mail at:
The Vermont Country Store
401 Innovation Drive
Attention: Personal Data Request
North Clarendon, VT 05759or online. If you wish to opt–out of the sale/sharing of personal information, you may contact us by email, phone, or mail, or through the following link: Do not sell my personal information.
If exercised, the decision to opt–out of the sale/sharing of personal information will be valid for 12 months, at which time we may request that you authorize the sale of personal information again.
Only you or a person that you authorize to act on your behalf may make a verifiable consumer request related to your personal information. However, you may also make a verifiable consumer request on behalf of your minor child.
You may make a verifiable consumer request up to two times within a twelve-month period, without charge. Unfortunately, we cannot respond to your request or provide you with personal information if we cannot verify your identity or authority to make the request and confirm that the personal information relates to you. Making a verifiable consumer request does not require you to create an account with us. We will only use personal information provided in a verifiable consumer request to verify the requestor's identity or authority to make the request.
We try to respond to a verifiable consumer request within 45 days of its receipt. If we require more time, we will inform you of the reason and extension time period (up to 90 days). If you have an account with us, we will deliver our response to that account. If you do not have an account with us, we will deliver our response by mail or electronically, at your option. Any disclosures we provide will only cover the 12-month period preceding receipt. The response we provide will also explain any reasons we cannot comply with a request, if applicable.
If you wish to opt–out of the sale/sharing of personal information, please use the following link: Do not sell my personal information. If exercised, the decision to opt–out will be valid for 12 months, at which time we may request that you authorize the sale/sharing of personal information again.
You have a right to appeal any denial of a consumer right.
We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of your rights under Connecticut law. Unless permitted Connecticut law, we will not:
- Deny you goods or services.
- Charge you different prices or rates for goods or services, including through discounts or other benefits, or imposing penalties.
- Provide you a different level or quality of goods or services.
- Suggest that you may receive a different price or rate for goods or services or a different level or quality of goods or services.
We may offer you certain financial incentives permitted by law that can result in different prices, rates, or quality levels. Any legally-permitted financial incentive we offer will reasonably relate to your Personal Information's value and contain written terms that describe the program's material aspects. Participation in a financial incentive program requires your prior opt in consent, which you may revoke at any time.
- We may deny your deletion request if retaining the information is necessary for us or our service providers to:
Policy Changes
Changes to this policy may occur in the future. Changes to our Privacy Policy will be posted to The Vermont Country Store website. We encourage you to review this Privacy Policy periodically. Your continued use of the Services indicates your consent to the Privacy Policy as posted.