Privacy Policy

PCC is GDRP Compliant.

 

We respect and protect your privacy!

Cookie and Privacy Policy

PC Components values your privacy and treats your personal data as confidential information. In addition, PCC is compliant with industry General Data Protection Regulations (GDRP).

The way that PCC collects information and what information it stores depends upon whether you have contacted our commercial division by calling our corporate office, or our eCommerce division by using the pccomponents.com website.

In both cases, information PCC collects is only available to employees at PCC with a reason to know, and is never shared with third parties without your express consent.

 

PCC Website (pccomponents.com)

When a prospective customer visits our website as a guest, PCC has no information to identify the user other than the IP address and the hard drive and browser of the computer. Our goal is always to provide customers with the best user experience possible. To do this PCC tracks searches performed by each IP and by each client computer.

Maintaining a history of prior searches allows PCC to focus on relevant information. For example, if the inventory levels or price of parts you have searched for changes, PCC would like to let you know. Similarly, PCC can provide you with a better user experience if we remind you about parts you have searched for in the past and allows you to view current inventory simply by clicking a link.

When you access our website as a guest, we do not know your name or account number, so we may use your IP address to link to your searches. If you work for a company which has other people using the same network, this means everyone on your network may be using the same IP. In this case, all users in your company may see the same search suggestions. People outside your company have a different IP address which means they will never see your list of recent searches.

Like most eCommerce website PCC needs a way to allow customerss to keep track of which parts you have added to your shopping cart. To do this, we use cookies. A cookies is a tiny string of data that is stored on your hard drive. Cookies are so small that the space they occupy on your hard drive is always negligible.

Cookies allow you to close your browser or even turn off your computer, without deleting the contents of your shopping cart.

To protect your privacy, PCC does not store any personal information, such as your name or IP address in these cookies. Instead, each cookie is given a unique identification number, which is also stored in your browser. As a result, only the browser that you used on your machine when the cookie was created is capable of reading cookies left on your computer.

While most of today's browsers give users the option to prevent the browser from storing cookies, doing so may prevent you from being able to use most of the features of the PCC website including the ability to save parts in your shopping cart.

Cookies added to your hard drive expire automatically after one year, to prevent your hard drive from becoming cluttered with these tiny files. You may also delete these cookies at any time. One very good way to learn how to delete browser cookies is by performing an Internet search, "How to Delete Cookies in <substitute your browser name and version>".

We do NOT save personal information of any type, including your IP address, in any cookie on elsewhere on your machine or in your browser.

To learn more about "Cookies" we suggest searching Learning about Internet Cookies" on YouTube.

In addition to using cookies to store information about your searches while visiting our website, we save information about your searches in a secure database on our server. This database includes the IP address of the machine used and other information that allows us to give you a more relavant user experience. We save the date and time of each search, the type of browser you are using, and the part numbers you have searched. While employees at PCC with a "need to know" may have access to this information, it is treated as confidential and never shared with anyone outside of PCC. Storing data on our server also allows us to give you a relavant experience even after you have updated or changed your browser.

PCC also monitors the number of searches performed by your computer on our website. This is to insure that our data is being used for its intended purpose, and not by those attempting to mine and harvest data from PCC's database.

PCC does not permit the use of "bots", whether software or hardware, designed to mine data, as these devices impact the overall performance of the PCC website when used by PCC customers who wish to search and purchase our inventory.

To insure that customers are not inconvenienced by others using "bots" to mine data, PCC monitors a number of various situations including how many searches are performed and how quickly searches are performed. If your computer, or if any other computer using your IP, exceeds any of these limits your IP will be blocked from performing searches on our website.

Customers who perform searches on our website never need to worry about accidentally exceeding PCC maximum search limits as all PCC limits are high enough to prevent any issues when a human performs searches.

The billing information that you enter on the check out form of pccomponents.com, including your credit card information, is never stored on your local machine or in our database. The personal information you enter is encrypted using 256K SSL encryption, and then sent through the payment gateway to our merchant services provider. The payment processing center returns a secure token used to tell us whether your payment has been authorized.

The information you enter in the shipping address section of the checkout form is saved on our servers. This information is used to provide you with tracking or other information about your order, to contact you when packages can not be delivered, to request feedback to help us improve our systems, and to include you in our email marketing campaigns.

 

Customers who Report our Marketing EMAILS as SPAM.

Marketing emails can play an important role in business today. As a result, customers who provide us with thier email address on the pccomponents website may be included in our marketing email campaigns. We realize that some customers may not wish to receive these emails, so they may unsubscribe from these emails at any time, simply by clicking the unsubscribe link provided at the bottom of each marketing email you receive.

These marketing emails allow us to send you special promotions, as well as other industry information that we believe may be of interest to our customers. Please keep in mind that these emails are completly legal when sent to customers and when sent to those who have agreed to our privacy policy. Customers who report our marketing emails as spam or illegal for any other reason may have thier IP blocked from using our website. Also note, may of our customers have purchased from PCC through eBay or other social or eCommerce platforms, and often forget that they are prior customers.

 

Malicious Attacks (Including SQL Injection)

PCC's policy is to prosecute criminals who perform cyber crimes. As a result, if you attempt to peform a cyber crime on the PCC website, PCC will turn over all personal data we are able to collect to the authorities. This only applies to website visitors who attempt to hack into PCC's database by inserting into any of PCC's input boxes a script written in Javascript or some other language, a maliciious URL, or SQL Injection code. PCC prohibits this practice and will permanently blacklist IP addresses which violate this policy. When an attack is detected on the PCC website (1) your visitors IP is immediately programatically blocked, (2) a trace is performed programatically to determine the location of the user's computer, and (3) the event details, along with this trace report, is emailed to the FBI Cyber Crime division.

 

Privacy Practices - Commercial Division (Corporate Office)

A few things are different when you conduct business with PCC through our Corporate Office.

When you contact our office, we ask you for your email address, name, and company name, so we use this information to track parts you have interest in instead.

The corporate side of PC Components only sells to businesses who purchase electronic components for resale and to a few other commercial accounts. Customers must set up an account prior to PCC issuing a quotation. Setting up an account with PCC requires that the customer provides Bank, Trade, and Credit references.

This is different one our website, where PCC sells to anyone who has a credit card or pay pal account, provided we can do so in accordance with the US Department of Commerce regulations.

When commercial customers contact PCC through our corporate office, PCC requires the customer to first setup an account prior to PCC issuing a price quotation. Once setup, PCC uses your Account Number to track quotations requested and orders placed. PCC also assigns a customer number to each individual who requests a quotation and calculates individual statistics based upon these quotations.

PCC stores this information in its database and uses this information to maintain statistics about your buying patterns. To maintain transparency we disclose the statistics we maintain in each quotation that we generate. These statistics are used as by our pricing algorithm which allows us to offer volume discounts that reflect purchases made to regular buyers.

PCC's pricing algorithm is based upon supply and demand, which means our prices are always subject to change although we honor quotations generated for 30 days. Our pricing algorithm considers world supply, demand, and competition.. As a result, when different companies contact PCC to request a quotation on the same part, PCC's base price will be different only if market conditions have changed. With this said, PCC also offers pricing discounts when market conditions permit to customers based upon prior purchases. In this case, the amount that PCC discounts its quoted price is based upon the customers prior buying statistics.

 

Email messages, including marketing emails, send in accordance with this policy are not SPAM. Marking these messages as SPAM may result in your IP being blocked which means your entire company may be added to our Do Not Quote list.

If you contact PCC and are told that we are unable to quote you because your company is on our "Do Not Quote" list, it may be because someone from your company marked one of our marketing emails as SPAM. We understand that SPAM is a huge problem and support regulations to restrict it, however, messages sent in accordance with this policy are not SPAM. Marking messages as SPAM can adversely effect a companies ability to market itself and its products. If your company has been added to our "Do Not Quote" list, and you would like your quoting privileges restored, only an executive officer of PCC can restore quoting privileges.