We are an ethical company, we included that in our name to make a statement and to serve as a reminder incase we ever might forget. This means a lot more to us than getting a few recycling bins and overusing the words eco or natural. Ethical business practices go beyond the ecological and enter every decision that a company makes.
Many temptations and exist in the business world to take short cuts with fiscal and legal compliance as well as information security, privacy and customer data issues. But our ethics weigh on us to resist those temptations and do everything correctly, in the interests of our customers whilst complying to relevant legislation.
When we started up Ethical Family Living we acknowledged that online security and data protection would be a big deal.
Our first decision was to take a look at where our customers data and email addresses might end up being stored or used.
We decided not to maintain a mailing list for a newsletter. Balancing the responsibility of storing so many private email addresses with the low perceived success of mailshots, we felt more comfortable not harvesting emails to stay in touch. Sorry MailChimp. But hey, isn’t that what social media is for?
And speaking of social media, we don’t connect our contact lists or upload our customers email addresses to social networks. And neither should anyone else!
For online purchases, the little padlock icon on the browser’s address bar confirms that payments are secure over SSL. We use Stripe, Klarna, Apple Pay, and Google Pay to process card transactions, which in our opinion are pretty safe bets. All of these providers process the payments on their own servers (an iframe or a popup window on our site) so we never have your payment details or card number handled by our servers. If we don’t have it we can’t loose it.
Many companies who process high volumes of online sales have really cool software which downloads their sales data from their web store to their accountancy programme, saving huge amounts of time with their book keeper or accounts. From personal experience working at other companies I can tell you that all of the sales data including the customer’s full name, billing address, delivery address, email and of course the purchase data is probably being downloaded by default from the shopping cart to their accounts programme. Is that a problem?
Our interpretation of GDPR is that if you don’t need it you don’t store it. So the question arises whether we need to download our customers email or delivery address for our accountancy?
HMRC in the UK says that we can operate with ‘simplified invoices’, pretty much the same as an anonymous till receipt from a high street store. So after lengthy consultations it was decided that for our B2C online sales to only save our customer’s delivery country on the accounts programme.
This means that neither the accountants, the tax man, the company which maintains the accounts software or anyone else in the company with access to our accounts programme would see any of the customers personal data. That’s safer for our customer data than downloading excess information which we really don’t need – and then trying to keep it safe. Just don’t download it.
We’re not special in being thoughtful with our customer’s privacy. Most businesses are. The message is that being an ethical company means that you approach the issues acknowledging that people matter more than profits. You treat your customer’s concerns with dignity. You apply a lot of ‘what if it were me’ into the thought process and you keep it transparent.
For two decades David has been the owner and director of several marketing and distribution companies. During this time he has learned the indisputable benefits of looking after customers, colleagues, workers, suppliers and the local community, treating them all as respected stakeholders in a common project. Recently he consolidated his personal beliefs and business ethics by founding the Natural Intimacy brand and developing it as an Ethical Company.
