Yes. The Company uses IP addresses to identify the customer and their shopping cart, as well as to help us diagnose any problems you encounter with the Hawthorne Products web server.

Customer names, email addresses, phone numbers, mailing addresses, and credit card information are used to process orders.

In the unlikely event that a customer experiences unauthorized use of a credit card, the customer should promptly report the fraudulent activity to their credit card company. Under the Fair Credit Billing Act, customers are only liable for the first $50 of the fraudulent charges. For more information, customers should check with their credit card company to verify specific terms and conditions.

The Company only sends information about our specials to our customers who find the information useful. Customers can opt out of receiving future communications from the Company when you set up accounts or by updating account information.

Today, the Internet is actually the safest way of doing business with a credit card. With today’s processing, it is safer to use credit cards online than it is to use it in more traditional ways, such as in retail stores or restaurants.

Hawthorne Products uses Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology for mutual authentication, data encryption and data integrity– all to ensure secure transactions for our customers. SSL is the industry-standard security protocol to encode sensitive information, such as credit card numbers. SSL creates a shared digital key which only lets the sender and the receiver of the transmission scramble or unscramble information. To everyone else, even the servers relaying the message, the SSL transmission is indecipherable. SSL encryption can only be broken by intercepting the encrypted message, recording it, and using a computer to try every possible combination until the key is cracked. Most keys range from 40 to 1,024 digits long of which the number of possible combinations can be into the billions and beyond.

Encryption is based on the mathematical scrambling and unscrambling of messages. The type of encryption used assigns two keys – one is a public key and one is a private key. When a message is sent to Hawthorne Products, customers use our public key to encrypt their messages. Once the Company receives the encrypted message, Hawthorne Products uses the private key to decode the message. The same key cannot both encrypt and decrypt information. So, information encrypted using the private key can only be decrypted using the public key, and vice versa- ensuring the security of private information.

Before completing any transaction on a website, customers should make sure the site is a Secure Site. Being on a Secure Site means users are connected under the cloak of SSL security. Customers can tell if they are on a Secure Site by noting a padlock or key somewhere along the bottom of the browser’s window. If the lock is closed or if the key is unbroken, the site is secure.

Simply put, a “cookie” is a small file that serves as an identifier stored on a local machine. Although not required, the Company uses cookies to make web shopping easier. For instance, when ready to purchase an additional item, customers only need to sign-in as opposed to entering all of your account information once again. A cookie can also save your passwords so they do not need to enter it each time users visit our site from a PC.