About cookies

What are cookies?

Cookies are tiny text files stored on your computer or other mobile or handheld device (such as smart ‘phones or ‘tablets’) when you visit certain web pages.

Cookies are essential to the effective operation of our website and to enable you to shop with us online. Cookies are also used to tailor the products and services offered and advertised to our customers, both on this website and elsewhere. The information collected by cookies cannot be used to identify you personally.

What do cookies do?

Cookies do lots of different things, like letting you navigate between pages effectively, storing your preferences, and generally improving your experience of a website.

If our website did not use cookies, you would appear to be a new visitor every time you moved to a different webpage; for example, after entering your log in details and moving to another page the website wouldn’t recognise you and would ask you to log in again.

Some other examples of what cookies can do include:

  • saving the contents of your shopping basket as you proceed through the checkout process;
  • remembering your account log in details so you can see information relating to your orders and manage your account;
  • recording the areas of our website that you have visited and for how long, as well as which products you viewed and purchased. We use this information to help us improve our website so that it is easy to use and so we can improve the services we provide to our customers. It also helps us to recommend relevant products and offers on our website.

Are cookies safe?

Yes cookies are 100% safe. Cookies do not harm your computer, they do not contain any information that could be used by others to identify you personally and they do not contain any confidential information, such as your email address or payment details.

What are the different types of cookie used by Farnell?

At Farnell we have categorised the cookies we use into four different types:

  1. Strictly Necessary Cookies
  2. Some cookies are strictly necessary to allow you to move about the website easily or to provide you with certain features you have requested, such as remembering your basket contents and identifying you as being logged onto the site.
    Manage my Cookie Preferences

  3. Performance Cookies
  4. Performance cookies collect information about how you use our website e.g. which pages you visit and if you experience any errors. These cookies don’t collect information that identifies a visitor, although they may collect the IP address of the device used to access the site. All information collected is only used to help us understand how our visitors use our website, what interests our users, and to measure how effective our pages are so that we can improve how we present our content to you. These cookies help to improve the performance of the website, providing a better experience for you.
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  5. Functionality Cookies
  6. Functionality cookies are used to remember settings about choices you’ve made on the website such as the language preference you’ve chosen for the site and your marketing preferences and allow us to provide services you’ve asked to use and to improve your visit.
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  7. Targeting and Advertising Cookies
  8. Targeting and advertising cookies are used to work out what advertising might be most relevant to you based on the areas you look at on our website.
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Third Party Cookies

Some of the cookies used on our website are set by third party organisations that we use for different services. For example, we use external analytics services by specialist suppliers and these suppliers may set cookies on our behalf in order to report back to us. We may also sometimes embed video or other content from websites such as YouTube and these sites may set their own cookies. Further details on the third party cookies are included on the example list of cookies we use on our site and you can check the relevant third party’s website for more information about their cookie policy.

You can see a full list of all cookies we use on our Cookie Settings Page.