Privacy policy

Sterling Bearings is a trading name of Bidco (Impex) Limited, based in Leicester. Bidco (Impex) Limited is the controller of your personal information, which means we decide how and why it is used.

• Orders and accounts: your name, company name, billing and delivery addresses, email address, phone number, order details and account login.
• Trade account applications: your business details, contact names, VAT and company numbers, trade references and the information we need to decide on credit.
• Enquiries: what you tell us when you request a price, email us, call us or message us on WhatsApp, including the parts you are interested in and any photos you attach. If you use a WhatsApp button on our website, we ask for your name, number and message first, and keep them with the page you were on and how you reached our site (for example, the advert you clicked), so we can reply even if the chat does not go through.
• Returns and complaints: the details you give us about the order and the problem, including any photos.
• Marketing preferences: if you sign up to hear from us, and any choices you make about what you receive.

Card payments are processed by Shopify Payments and our other payment providers. We do not see or store your full card details.

When you visit our website we, and the providers we work with, collect information about your device and how you use the site: IP address, browser and device type, approximate location, the pages you view, the products you look at, how you arrived at the site (for example from an advert or a search engine) and actions such as adding to basket or completing a purchase. Some of this is collected using cookies and similar technologies. Analytics and advertising cookies are only used if you consent. See section 5.

• Payment providers, who confirm whether a payment succeeded and help us prevent fraud.
• Delivery companies, who tell us about the progress of your delivery.
• Credit reference agencies and trade referees, if you apply for a trade account (see section 3).
• Advertising and analytics providers, who give us reports about how our adverts and website perform. These are normally aggregated and do not identify you.

Data protection law requires us to have a lawful basis for each use of your personal information.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed them against your rights and you can object at any time (see section 10). We do not make decisions about you based solely on automated processing that have legal or similarly significant effects.

We do not sell your personal information. We share it only with organisations that help us run our business, and only as far as they need it:

• Shopify, which hosts our online store and processes orders and payments.
• Payment providers, including Shopify Payments and any other payment method you choose at checkout.
• Delivery companies, most often DHL and FedEx, who need your name, address and contact details to deliver your order. For deliveries outside the UK this includes customs authorities.
• Sage, our accounting system, and our own customer and product database, together with the IT and software providers who maintain them.
• Email and messaging providers, including Brevo, which sends the emails generated by our price request form, Cloudflare, which processes that form, and WhatsApp (Meta), if you choose to message us there.
• Analytics and advertising providers: Google (Google Analytics and Google Ads), Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and LinkedIn. See sections 5 and 6.
• Credit reference agencies, if you apply for a trade account.
• Our website agency, Wyze Digital, which builds and maintains this website and has access to store data to do so.
• Professional advisers such as our accountants, lawyers and insurers.
• Authorities such as HMRC, the police or regulators, where the law requires it.
• A buyer of our business, if we sell or restructure all or part of it, under the same protections as this policy.

Cookies are small files stored on your device. We also use similar technologies, such as pixels and your browser's local storage. When you first visit our website, a cookie banner asks for your choices. Analytics and marketing cookies are not used unless you accept them.

We use Google Consent Mode. If you decline analytics or marketing cookies, Google's tags do not set those cookies, and send only limited signals without cookies that Google uses to estimate results in aggregate.

You can change your choices at any time using the cookie settings link in our website footer. You can also block or delete cookies in your browser settings, although parts of the site may not work properly if you block necessary cookies.

The providers' own policies explain how they use the information: Google, Meta, LinkedIn and Shopify.

We advertise on Google (including Search, Shopping and YouTube), Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and LinkedIn. With your consent, the tags described in section 5 tell these platforms when you visit our site or complete an action such as a purchase or enquiry. This lets us measure which adverts work and show our adverts to people who have already visited our site. Google, Meta and LinkedIn may combine this with information they already hold about you if you have an account with them, in line with their own policies.

When you complete a purchase or enquiry, we may also send details of that event directly to these platforms from our systems, including your email address or phone number in a scrambled (hashed) form, so they can match it to their users. This helps us measure results accurately.

We may upload contact details of our customers and trade account holders, in hashed form, to Google, Meta or LinkedIn, so that we can show relevant adverts to existing customers, find similar businesses, or stop showing adverts to people who are already customers. The platforms use the hashed details only to match them with their users and do not keep the details of people they cannot match. You can ask us not to include you at any time by emailing sales@sterlingbearings.com.

You can also control the adverts you see through your settings on each platform: Google ad settings, Meta ad preferences and LinkedIn advertising preferences.

We will only send you marketing emails if you have agreed to receive them, or if you are an existing customer and we are telling you about products similar to those you have bought, and you have not opted out. Every marketing email includes a link to unsubscribe, and you can also email us to stop them. Unsubscribing does not affect emails about your orders or account.

Some of our providers, including Shopify, Google, Meta and LinkedIn, store or access information outside the UK, including in the United States and Canada. Where they do, the transfer is protected by a UK adequacy decision (such as the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, or the adequacy decision for Canada), or by the International Data Transfer Agreement or approved standard contractual clauses.

• Orders, invoices and trade account records: six years after the end of the financial year they relate to, which is what UK tax law requires.
• Closed trade accounts: six years after the account closes.
• Enquiries that do not lead to an order: up to two years.
• Online store accounts: until you ask us to close your account, subject to the order records above.
• Marketing preferences: until you unsubscribe. We then keep a record of the opt-out so we do not contact you again.
• Analytics data: up to 14 months in Google Analytics. Cookie lifetimes are shown in the table in section 5.

You have the right to:

• ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you;
• ask us to correct information that is wrong or incomplete;
• ask us to delete your information, where we no longer have a reason to keep it;
• ask us to restrict how we use your information;
• object to our use of your information where we rely on legitimate interests, and to stop direct marketing at any time;
• receive information you gave us in a portable format, or have it sent to another organisation;
• withdraw your consent at any time, where we rely on consent. This does not affect anything we did before you withdrew it.

To use any of these rights, email sales@sterlingbearings.com. There is normally no charge. We may need to confirm your identity, and we will respond within one month.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please contact us first so we can try to put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113. If you live in the European Economic Area, you can complain to the data protection authority in your country.

We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your information, including encrypted connections on our website, access controls on our systems and contracts requiring our providers to protect it. Payments are handled by providers that meet card industry security standards.

Our website and products are intended for adults and businesses. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18.

We may update this policy from time to time. The date at the top shows when it was last changed. If we make significant changes, we will make that clear on our website.

Bidco (Impex) Limited, trading as Sterling Bearings
Sterling House, 2 Law Street, Leicester, LE4 5GR
sales@sterlingbearings.com