Our websites use cookies to collect information. This includes information about browsing and purchasing behaviour by people who access our websites. This includes information about pages viewed, products purchased and the customer journey around our websites. Detailed information is set out in our Cookie Policy.
Cookie Policy
WHICH WEBSITES DOES THIS POLICY RELATE TO?
This policy applies to all Marks and Spencer Plc (“M&S”) owned and operated websites, both in the UK and in the international territories in which we operate. This includes M&S owned web pages which refer a user to M&S branded products and services which are provided by third party organisations.
WHAT ARE COOKIES?
Like most websites, M&S websites use cookies and other similar technologies which store or provide access to information stored in your devices including, web beacons, plug ins, APIs, and fingerprinting technologies which permit the identification and tracking of a device. For the purpose of this policy we use the term “cookies” to include any technology that stores or accesses information on a user’s device.
Cookies are small data files which are placed on your computer or other devices (such as smart ‘phones or ‘tablets’) as you browse M&S websites. They are used to ‘remember’ when your computer or device accesses our websites, or to identify you as an M&S customer when you visit other websites. They can be used for just the duration of your visit (“session cookies”) or they can be used to measure how you interact with services and content over time (“persistent cookies”).
CONSENT FOR USE OF COOKIES
In most cases cookies cannot be deployed without consent.When you first enter our websites, you will be shown a pop-up cookie notification banner. The banner informs the user that our site uses cookies and similar technologies. When you click ‘close’ on the banner, we deem you to have consented to non-essential cookies unless you have disabled them using your browser settings.
WHAT DO WE USE COOKIES FOR?
Essential cookies
1. We use essential cookies to deliver and maintain on-line services, including providing basic website functionality, remembering your basket content, facilitating transactions and payments, fraud prevention, and maintaining and securing our websites;and
2. At an aggregated level, we use cookies to measure activity and engagement of visitors to our sites, and to provide data and statistics on how our website and services are used.
Essential cookies used for these purposes are deployed automatically for all users as soon as they enter our websites. If you wish to use our sites you cannot opt out of these cookies as they are an essential and integral feature.
Non-essential cookies
With your consent, we’ll also use cookies to:
1. Improve the quality of our services and develop new ones
2. Enable special website features such as widgets or embedded media files for example. These website features are not essential to the operation of the website but are intended to enhance user experience. They also allow us to develop and test new website features.
3. Enable M&S to meet its contractual obligations to make payments to third parties when a product is purchased by someone who has visited our website from a site operated by those parties.
This includes cookies used to:-
Show personalised content based on your interests, preferences or location
These types of cookies allow us to improve the way our websites and mobile apps work so that we can personalise your experience and show you content which is most relevant to you.
For example, a product or service may only be available in a particular location and may be more relevant to you depending on where you are, or we might show you certain products or services that we believe are most relevant to you based on your previous browsing or purchasing behaviour.
Show personalised or generic adverts either on M&S or third-party websites
We also use cookies to help us deliver online advertising that we believe is most relevant to you on our websites and third-party websites, including on social media such as Facebook, Instagram or Google.
These types of cookies may collect information about your online attributes or behaviour, such as your device identifier and/or IP address, the website you arrived from and information about your browsing and purchase history or the content of your shopping basket.
To help us to deliver online advertising that is relevant to you, we may also combine data we collect through cookies in the browser of your desktop computer or other devices with other data that we have collected, for example your purchases online and in store.
Deliver and measure the effectiveness of adverts
Some cookies can tell us if you have seen a specific advert, and when you saw it. This information allows us to measure the effectiveness of our online advertising campaigns and control the number of times you are shown an advert.
We also use cookies to measure the effectiveness of our marketing communications, for example by telling us if you have opened a marketing email that we have sent.
WHAT IF YOU DON’T WANT NON-ESSENTIAL COOKIES TO BE USED?
You can continue to use our website and complete transactions without consenting to cookies, but if you do this some website functionality may be impaired.
Note - if you have already consented to cookies on our website, you can change your preferences by clearing cookies from your browser and re-entering our site. This will cause the pop-up banner to re-display and you can choose to use the site without consenting to cookies.
HOW TO DISABLE COOKIES VIA YOUR BROWSER SETTINGS?
You can also disable cookies by changing your website browser settings to reject cookies. How you can do this will depend on the browser you use. Further details on how to disable cookies for the most popular browsers are set out below: -
For Microsoft Internet Explorer:
1. Choose the menu “tools” then “Internet Options”
2. Click on the “privacy” tab
3. Select the setting the appropriate setting
For Google Chrome:
1. Choose Settings> Advanced
2. Under "Privacy and security," click “Content settings”.
3. Click “Cookies”
For Safari:
1. Choose Preferences > Privacy
2. Click on “Remove all Website Data”
For Mozilla firefox:
1. Choose the menu “tools” then “Options”
2. Click on the icon “privacy”
3. Find the menu “cookie” and select the relevant options
For Opera 6.0 and further:
1. Choose the menu Files”> “Preferences”
2. Privacy
WHAT HAPPENS IF I DISABLE COOKIES?
This depends on which cookies you disable, but in general the website may not operate properly if cookies are switched off. If you only disable third party cookies, you will not be prevented from making purchases on our sites. If you disable all cookies, you will be unable to complete a purchase on our sites.
WHAT COOKIES DO WE USE?
| Cookie type | Key purposes |
|---|---|
| Essential | These cookies are essential to the basic operation of the website and cannot be disabled because the website will not function without them. These cookies are essential to the basic operation of the website and cannot be disabled because the website will not function without them. They are used for various functions that allow the website to operate, including:
Security functions including;
|
| Functional | These cookies make your shopping experience easier. They enable basic functions such as seeing recently viewed products or searches. Switching off these cookies will mean that areas of our website won’t work properly. They are used for various functions to improve your shopping experience such as:
|
| Personalisation | These cookies help us to learn what you’re interested in so we can show you relevant content while you shop on our site. Switching off these cookies will mean you see a generic version of the website, rather than content which is more relevant to you They are used for various functions to tailor our website to your preferences and interests, including:
|
| Analytics | These cookies gather information such as how many people are using our site or which pages are popular to help us improve customer experience. Switching off these cookies will mean we are less able to gather information to improve your experience. They are used to help us understand how you interact with our website, products and/or services so that we can better understand your needs. For example, we collect and analyse information about:
|
| Advertising | These cookies help us to learn what you’re interested in so we can show you relevant adverts on other websites. Switching off these cookies will mean you will see generic advertising on other websites, rather than ads which are most relevant to you. They are used to:
|
| NAME | DESCRIPTION | CATEGORY | EXPIRY |
|---|---|---|---|
| __cf_bm | To read and filter requests from bots. | Strictly Necessary | A few seconds |
| _cfuvid | The _cfuvid cookie is set on a user’s browser to assign them a unique ID in addition to identifying them through their IP address. Without this cookie, visitors to a site will be recognized as the same user if they share the same IP, and any data collected will be shared for all users with that IP. | Strictly Necessary | End of session |
| AWSALBCORS | AWS Application Load Balancer Cookie: This cookie is managed by AWS and is used for load balancing as well. With cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) requests, some browsers require SameSite=None; Secure to enable stickiness. In this case, the load balancer generates a second stickiness cookie, AWSALBCORS, which includes the same information as the original stickiness cookie, AWSALB, plus the SameSite attribute. Clients receive both cookies. | Strictly necessary | 7 days |
| AWSALBTG | AWS Application Load Balancer Cookie: The ASWALBTG cookie is a load balancer-generated cookie for Weighted Target Groups. It is used to honor sticky sessions and enable target group stickiness. When the load balancer first routes a request to a weighted target group, it generates an encrypted cookie named AWSALBTG that encodes information about the selected target group and includes the cookie in the response to the client. When the load balancer receives a request from the same client that matches a rule with target group stickiness enabled and contains the cookie, the request is routed to the target group specified in the cookie. | Strictly necessary | 7 days |
| ASP.NET_SessionId | ASP.Net_SessionId is a Microsoft cookie which is used to identify the users session on the server. The session is an area on the server which can be used to store data in between HTTP requests. ASP.NET_SessionId is created by the webserver when the session starts so in the next requests, the Request Header has that ASP.NET_SessionId and it is the same as the Response Header. This ASP.NET_SessionId will be used to identify the specific user session and ensures that this request is from the same client that created the previous request. | Strictly necessary | End of browser session |
| AWSALBTGCORS | AWS Application Load Balancer Cookie: This load-balancing cookie is managed by AWS and is for Weighted Target Groups associated with cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) requests. With CORS requests, some browsers require SameSite=None; Secure to enable stickiness. In this case, the elastic load balancer generates a second stickiness cookie, AWSALBCORS, which includes the same information as the original stickiness cookie, AWSALBTG, plus the SameSite attribute. Clients receive both cookies in response. | Strictly necessary | 7 days |
| AWSALB | AWS Application Load Balancer Cookie: This cookie is used to introduce stickiness across the session. Used to map the session to the instance. When the load balancer (the server) first receives a request from a client, it routes the request to a target, generating this encrypted cookie that encodes information about the selected target, and includes it in the response to the client. Also, it registers which server cluster is serving the visitor, and this is used in context with load balancing to optimize the user experience. | Strictly necessary | 7 days |
| __CookieConsentV300 | Any site using Investis Digital Cookie Manager will contain this cookie. The cookie deals with alerting users of the use of cookies at the time of the first load. It stores the preferences saved by the user and helps drop only those cookies that are consented to by the user. | Strictly necessary | 180 days |
| _ga | This cookie name is associated with Google Universal Analytics - which is a significant update to Google's more commonly used analytics service. This cookie is used to distinguish unique users by assigning a randomly generated number as a client identifier. It is included in each page request in a site and used to calculate visitor, session and campaign data for the sites analytics reports. By default it is set to expire after 2 years, although this is customisable by website owners | Performance | 400 days |
| _ga_M988750QK8 | Used by Google Analytics to identify and track an individual session with your device. | Performance | 400 days |
| _gid | This cookie name is associated with Google Universal Analytics. This appears to be a new cookie and as of Spring 2017 no information is available from Google. It appears to store and update a unique value for each page visited. | Performance | End of browser session |
| _gat | This cookie name is associated with Google Universal Analytics, according to documentation it is used to throttle the request rate - limiting the collection of data on high traffic sites. It expires after 10 minutes. | Performance | 1 minute |
| _gat_UA-4653261-2 | This is a pattern type cookie set by Google Analytics, where the pattern element on the name contains the unique identity number of the account or website it relates to. It appears to be a variation of the _gat cookie which is used to limit the amount of data recorded by Google on high traffic volume websites. | Performance | End of browser session |
| _gat_gtag_UA_4653261_2 | This cookie is part of Google Analytics and is used to limit requests (throttle request rate).Google Analytics | Performance | End of browser session |
| VISITOR_PRIVACY_METADATA | YouTube is a Google owned platform for hosting and sharing videos. YouTube collects user data through videos embedded in websites, which is aggregated with profile data from other Google services in order to display targeted advertising to web visitors across a broad range of their own and other websites. | Marketing | 5 months |
| YSC | YouTube is a Google owned platform for hosting and sharing videos. YouTube collects user data through videos embedded in websites, which is aggregated with profile data from other Google services in order to display targeted advertising to web visitors across a broad range of their own and other websites. | Marketing | Session |
| __Secure-ROLLOUT_TOKEN | YouTube is a Google owned platform for hosting and sharing videos. YouTube collects user data through videos embedded in websites, which is aggregated with profile data from other Google services in order to display targeted advertising to web visitors across a broad range of their own and other websites. | Marketing | 5 months |
| VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE | This cookie is used as a unique identifier to track viewing of videos | Marketing | 5 months |
You deserve more...
With Sparks, we surprise you with exclusive offers, rewards and promotions.