Privacy & Cookies

Who we are

Discount Warehouse Club is operated by Burlington Scott (Scotland) Limited (company number SC233333), registered in Scotland. Our warehouse and showroom is at 9/11 Palacecraig St, Whifflet St, Coatbridge ML5 4RY, open 9am–5pm, Monday to Friday. We are the "data controller" responsible for processing your personal information and overseeing compliance with this Privacy Notice.

We haven't appointed a dedicated Data Protection Officer due to our size and the nature of the date we process. Should you have any queries in relation to your Data, please use the contact details provided below and someone from our Team will be in touch.

The short version

The General Data Protection Regulation (the "GDPR") seeks to protect and enhance the rights of data subjects. This Privacy Notice will set out how we collect and use any information provided to us directly or when you use our website.

This Privacy Notice supplements the other notices and is not intended to override them.

Information we collect

When shopping with us or when creating an account, we will be required to collect all personal date required to proceed your Order and run your account. This will include but is not limited to:-

• Account details: name, email, delivery and billing address, phone number
• Order history, Club membership status and dates (when it started and when it's due to lapse), and student verification status where applicable
• Payment details, handled directly by our payment provider (Stripe) — we don't store full card numbers, expiry dates, or security codes ourselves at any point
• Your university email address, if you verify as a student — used only to confirm and re-confirm eligibility for the student discount, and not for any other purpose such as marketing
• Records of returns, refunds, and any customer service correspondence with us, including emails, phone call notes, and any photos you send us of a faulty item
• What you search for and browse on the site, including queries typed into Warehouse Search
• Technical information like your IP address, browser, and device, mainly via cookies (see below)
• If you buy in person at our showroom, the same order and payment information as an online purchase, collected at the point of sale rather than through the website

We don't knowingly collect information from anyone under the age of 18, in line with our terms requiring account holders to be adults. If we become aware that we've inadvertently collected information from someone under 18, we'll delete it once identified.

We may also receive and collect data from Third Parties which is necessary in the effective delivery of our contractual obligations to you.

We will only ever keep and collect the Data which is necessary and essential to fulfill our contractual obligations with you as a Customer. Where any information to be collected is optional, we will highlight this at the time of our request.

Why we're allowed to use it

Data protection law requires us to have a valid reason ("lawful basis") for processing and using your information. We will use your personal information to

• Fulfill our Contractual obligations: processing your order, running your Club membership, applying your student discount, and handling returns. Without your information we would be unable to fulfil our contractual requirements when you shop with us. This also covers postage and delivery information that is required.
• Fulfill our Legal obligations: keeping financial records for tax purposes for the periods required by law, and responding to lawful requests from courts, regulators, or law enforcement where we're required to.
• Aid our Legitimate interests: preventing fraud and misuse of Club or Student pricing, keeping the site secure, and understanding how it's used so we can improve it — always balanced against your right to privacy, and never used to justify something that would override that right. If we ever felt a particular use tipped too far into affecting your privacy unfairly, we wouldn't rely on this basis for it.
• Gain your Consent: marketing emails, and any non-essential (analytics or marketing) cookies — both entirely optional, both things you can withdraw consent for at any time, and neither of which affects your ability to actually shop with us if you decline.

How we use it

• To process, fulfil, and deliver your orders, including calculating the correct delivery charge for your order's size, weight, and your membership status
• To run your Club account and apply your correct pricing — Club, Student, or standard, worked out automatically each time you shop
• To handle returns and refunds, including working out the correct return postage deduction where that applies to your order
• To improve search and product recommendations, including Warehouse Search — using aggregated patterns in what people search for, not by building an individual profile of you specifically for this purpose
• To send you order updates (always) and marketing emails (only if you've actively opted in — this is never on by default)
• To meet our legal, tax, and accounting obligations
• To investigate and prevent fraud or misuse of Club or Student pricing, including reviewing account activity where we have reasonable grounds to suspect misuse

If customers do not provide us with all of the personal information we require to collect in order to perform our obligations, then this may affect our ability to fulfil orders.

We will only ever use your information for necessary purposes and any decisions to be made on the basis of your information will be done by our Data Controller.

What happens to your data in specific situations

A few situations worth spelling out plainly, since a general policy doesn't always make these obvious:

• If you close your account: we stop using your information for anything beyond what's legally required (see "How long we keep your information" below) — your account and any saved details are no longer accessible to you or actively used by us for marketing or personalisation.
• If your Club membership lapses without renewing: we don't delete your account or history — it simply stops carrying Club pricing. Your order history and account details remain exactly as they would for any other account.
• If you're a verified student and later graduate or lose access to your university email: your verification will eventually expire on its normal 12-month cycle rather than being removed immediately — we don't proactively check whether a university email is still "active".
• If you place an order as a guest without creating an account: we still hold the information needed to fulfil that specific order and meet our legal obligations, for the same retention periods as an account holder's order

Cookies we use

Cookies are small files stored on your device when you visit a website. They can do a range of things — remembering who you are between pages, remembering choices you've made, or helping a business understand how its site is used. We group ours into three categories:

Essential

Needed for the site to work at all — keeping items in your basket as you move between pages, keeping you signed in so you're not asked to log in again on every page, and remembering your Club or Student pricing status as you browse so the right price shows without needing to re-check it constantly. These can't be switched off without breaking core functionality like checkout, and don't require your consent under cookie law, since a site genuinely can't function without them — this is a recognised, narrow exception, not a way of avoiding asking for consent more broadly.

Analytics

Help us understand how the site is used in aggregate — which pages people visit, how they move through the site, and where people tend to leave without completing a purchase — so we can fix what's broken and improve what isn't. Information collected this way is aggregated and used to understand patterns across many visitors, not to build an individually identifying profile of any one person for this specific purpose. We currently use Google Analytics for this purpose.

Marketing

Used to show you more relevant offers, both on this site and, in some cases, on other sites you visit afterwards, based on your browsing here. Only ever set if you've given consent through the cookie preference tool, never by default, and you can withdraw that consent at any time, after which these cookies stop being set and any existing ones are respected as withdrawn going forward.

A full, current list of the individual cookies in each category — including their specific names, which organisation sets each one, and how long each one lasts on your device — is available through the cookie preferences tool linked in the site footer, since that list can change as we add or remove specific tools and would otherwise quickly go out of date if stated as a fixed list here.

Managing your cookie preferences

When you first visit the site, you'll be asked to choose which non-essential cookies you're happy for us to use, with a genuine choice to accept only some categories rather than an all-or-nothing decision. You can change your mind at any time afterwards via the cookie preferences link in the site footer, or by adjusting your browser's own cookie settings directly. Blocking essential cookies through your browser (rather than through our preference tool, which doesn't offer to switch these off in the first place) may stop parts of the site — like your basket remembering its contents, or staying logged in — from working correctly, and isn't something we can prevent if done at the browser level.

Sharing your information

We share what's genuinely necessary with the people who help us run the store, and never for their own independent marketing use — meaning, for example, our courier doesn't get to use your address for anything beyond delivering your parcel. We don't sell your personal data to anyone, under any circumstances. The main organisations we share information with are:

• Stripe, our payment processor, to take payment for orders and Club membership securely — they see your payment details directly; we don't
• Our delivery couriers (Evri and Royal Mail), to get your order to you and provide tracking — they see your name, delivery address, and contact details needed to deliver and to contact you about the delivery if needed
• Our website hosting provider, who stores the site and the information on it securely on our behalf, as a processor acting on our instructions rather than an independent user of your data
• Google Analytics, for site analytics, and Mailchimp, our email marketing platform, if you've opted in to marketing emails
• Regulators, law enforcement, or other authorities, but only where we're legally required to provide information, and only to the extent that requirement actually covers

If the business is ever sold, restructured, or its assets transferred to another company, your information may be transferred as part of that process — but only to a party that agrees to handle it in line with this policy, and we'd let you know if this happened and it materially changed how your data is used.

Where your data is processed

We aim to keep your information within the UK wherever practical. Some of the organisations we work with, including our payment processor, may process data outside the UK as part of how they operate internationally. Where that happens, we rely on legally recognised safeguards (such as Standard Contractual Clauses approved for this purpose) to make sure your information stays protected to UK data protection standards regardless of where it's physically processed.

How long we keep your information

• Account and order information: for as long as your account is active, and for a further period of 6 years to meet UK tax and accounting record-keeping requirements — this applies whether the account is closed by you or becomes inactive over time
• Club membership and student verification records: for the duration of membership/verification, plus the same 6-year period afterwards, since these form part of your order and account history for tax purposes
• Marketing consent and preferences: until you withdraw consent, or your account has been inactive for a significant period, at which point we'd expect consent to no longer genuinely reflect your current wishes
• Customer service correspondence, including returns and complaints: typically for a similar period to order records, since disputes or queries can sometimes arise well after the original transaction
• CCTV footage from our showroom: 30 days on a rolling basis, unless a specific recording needs to be kept longer as part of an ongoing investigation into theft, fraud, or an incident on the premises

If you ask us to delete your data, we'll remove what we genuinely can while still meeting our legal obligations — for example, we may need to keep basic order and payment records for the tax retention period above even after a deletion request, but would delete anything not covered by that requirement, such as marketing preferences or browsing history tied to your account.

Keeping your information secure

We use reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect your information, including secure (HTTPS) connections across the site, restricting access to personal data internally to what's genuinely needed to do the job, and never storing full card details ourselves — that's handled directly by Stripe, who are independently certified to the payment industry's own security standards for this purpose. No method of storing or transmitting data online is completely without risk, and we don't claim otherwise, but we work to keep that risk as low as reasonably possible and to respond quickly if something ever did go wrong.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law, you have the right to:

• Ask what personal data we hold about you, and get a copy of it
• Ask us to correct anything that's inaccurate or incomplete
• Ask us to delete your data, in certain circumstances (subject to the legal retention requirements described above)
• Ask us to restrict or object to certain uses of your data
• Ask for your data in a portable, machine-readable format, where technically feasible
• Withdraw consent at any time, for anything we rely on your consent for — this doesn't affect anything done under that consent before you withdrew it

You can also unsubscribe from marketing emails whenever you like using the link in any email we send, without needing to make a formal request. If you're unhappy with how we've handled a request, or with our use of your data generally, you have the right to complain to the UK's data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk) — though we'd genuinely welcome the chance to sort it out directly with you first, and would ask that you give us that opportunity before escalating where possible.

Changes to this policy

We may change this Privacy Notice at any time by updating this page so you should therefore request a copy of any update from time to time to ensure you are aware of any changes. Where applicable we will of course send you our updated privacy notice.

This policy was last updated on 4th September 2026 and shall be regularly monitored and reviewed.

Get in touch

Questions about this policy, your data, or your cookie preferences? Get in touch and we'll take it from there:
Email: hello@discountwarehouseclub.co.uk
Phone: 07878 868230
Post: Burlington Scott (Scotland) Limited, 9/11 Palacecraig St, Whifflet St, Coatbridge ML5 4RY