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Privacy Policy

‌Effective Date: October 26, 2026‌

Welcome to the privacy policy of HITCHON INTERNATIONAL LIMITED. This document is designed to clearly outline how we collect, use, store, protect, and manage your personal information when you use our e-commerce shopping website accessible at www.hitchoninternational.com. We at HITCHON INTERNATIONAL LIMITED are fully committed to upholding the highest standards of data privacy, in full compliance with applicable New Zealand privacy laws and global data protection best practices, to ensure that your personal information is always treated with the utmost care, transparency, and respect.

1. Introduction & Data Controller Information

For the purposes of all relevant data protection regulations, the data controller for your personal information collected through our platform is HITCHON INTERNATIONAL LIMITED. You may reach out to us at any time using the following contact details:

  • Registered Physical Address: 10 Syd Bradley Road, Avonhead, Christchurch 8042, New Zealand
  • Official Contact Email: [email protected]
  • Contact Telephone Number: +64 3 357 8979

This privacy policy applies to all visitors, registered users, customers, and any other individuals who access or interact with our e-commerce website, make purchases on our platform, sign up for our marketing communications, or participate in any of our online services. By accessing and using our website, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to all the terms laid out in this policy. If you do not agree with any part of this policy, we kindly request that you refrain from using our platform and submitting any of your personal information to us.

2. Categories of Personal Information We Collect

We only collect personal information that is directly relevant to providing you with a seamless, secure, and convenient e-commerce shopping experience. The types of information we may gather fall into the following categories:

2.1 Information You Voluntarily Provide to Us

This refers to all data you actively submit when interacting with our platform:

  • Account Registration Details: When you create a user account on our website, we collect your full name, email address, chosen account password, contact phone number, and preferred communication preferences.
  • Checkout and Order Fulfilment Information: When you place an order on our store, we collect your billing address, delivery/shipping address, payment card or payment method details (processed through our PCI-compliant third-party payment processors), order notes, and any customisation specifications you submit for your purchased products.
  • Customer Support Correspondence: If you reach out to our support team via email, website contact forms, or phone to ask questions, report order issues, request returns or refunds, we keep records of your communications including the content of your messages and your related contact details to resolve your concerns effectively.
  • Marketing and Survey Participation Data: If you opt in to receive our promotional newsletters, exclusive offers, or respond to our customer satisfaction surveys, we collect your consent records, feedback responses, and preference data related to product categories you are interested in.
  • User Generated Content: If you choose to leave product reviews, upload photos of purchased items, comment on our social media-linked website features, or participate in our community forums, we collect the content you post alongside your associated account profile information.

2.2 Automatically Collected Information From Your Website Visit

When you browse our website, our systems automatically capture non-identifiable and session-related data to improve our platform performance and user experience:

  • Device and Technical Data: This includes your IP address, browser type and version, operating system details, device model and specifications, time zone settings, and unique device identifiers.
  • Browsing Activity Data: We log your clickstream behaviour, pages viewed on our website, time spent on each page, product search queries, referral sources (the external website that directed you to our store), exit pages, and download actions.
  • Cookie and Tracking Technology Data: We use standard industry cookies, web beacons, and pixel tags to remember your login status, save your shopping cart contents between visits, personalise your product recommendations, analyse website traffic patterns, and measure the performance of our marketing campaigns. You have full control to adjust your browser settings to refuse cookies, though this may limit some functional features of our e-commerce platform.

3. How We Use Your Personal Information

All processing of your personal information is based on legitimate, clearly defined purposes that are directly tied to delivering our e-commerce services to you. We use your collected data for the following core objectives:

  • ‌Order Processing and Fulfilment‌: We use your contact, shipping, and payment details to process your submitted orders, arrange for product shipping and delivery, send you real-time order status updates, process eligible returns, exchanges and refunds, and resolve any logistics-related issues that may arise during the delivery process.
  • ‌Website Functionality and User Experience Optimization‌: Your browsing data and account details allow us to maintain your logged-in session, preserve your saved shopping cart, personalise your website interface experience, suggest products that align with your past browsing and purchase history, and resolve technical glitches or accessibility issues to make our platform easier for all users to navigate.
  • ‌Security and Fraud Prevention‌: We use your device data, account activity logs, and transaction records to detect unauthorised access attempts to your account, identify fraudulent payment activities, prevent malicious use of our platform, and protect both our users and our business from financial harm and data breaches.
  • ‌Customer Support and Dispute Resolution‌: Your contact information and correspondence records allow our support team to respond to your enquiries in a timely manner, track your open support tickets, follow up on unresolved issues, and ensure that all your requests for assistance are addressed thoroughly.
  • ‌Marketing Communications (With Explicit Consent)‌: If you have given us your explicit opt-in consent, we will send you periodic email newsletters, exclusive discount offers, new product launch announcements, and event information that we believe may be of interest to you. You can opt out of receiving these marketing messages at any time, with immediate effect, by clicking the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of every marketing email, or sending an email to our designated privacy contact email at [email protected].
  • ‌Legal Compliance‌: We may process and retain your personal information as required by applicable New Zealand tax regulations, consumer protection laws, customs declaration rules for international shipments, and any valid court order, government regulatory request or legal process that we are obligated to comply with.
  • ‌Service Improvement and Analytics‌: We aggregate anonymised user data to perform statistical analysis of our sales trends, customer demographic profiles, website traffic patterns, and product performance, to help us make informed decisions about expanding our product catalogue, adjusting our pricing strategies, and improving our overall e-commerce service offerings.

4. Information Sharing and Disclosure of Your Personal Data

HITCHON INTERNATIONAL LIMITED will never sell, rent, or lease your personal information to unaffiliated third parties for their independent marketing purposes, without your explicit written consent. We only share your necessary personal data with trusted third-party partners who are essential to the operation of our e-commerce business, under strict data protection agreements that mandate these partners to uphold the same level of privacy protection as we do. These permitted categories of third parties include:

  • ‌Approved Payment Processors‌: We share your payment card and transaction related data with PCI DSS compliant payment service providers to complete your payment processing securely. None of our payment partners store your full credit card CVV data on their permanent servers.
  • ‌Logistics and Shipping Partners‌: We share your full name, delivery address, and contact phone number with our contracted courier and freight service providers, for the sole purpose of arranging the delivery of your ordered products, tracking shipments, and successfully completing the handover of your purchased items.
  • ‌Cloud Service and Website Hosting Providers‌: Your account data and website browsing records are stored on secure encrypted cloud servers operated by our vetted hosting service providers, who are bound by strict data confidentiality obligations and are prohibited from accessing or using your personal information for any unauthorised purposes.
  • ‌Professional Service Providers‌: We may share limited necessary personal information with our contracted accounting firms, legal advisors, and IT security consultants, to the extent that it is required for these professionals to perform their contracted services to support our business operations.
  • ‌Regulatory Authorities and Legal Bodies‌: We may disclose your personal information when we are legally required to do so, in order to comply with a binding court order, government regulatory inspection, valid legal subpoena, or to protect our legal rights, property, and the personal safety of our staff and platform users.

In the event of a future merger, acquisition, sale of all or part of our business assets, our company will ensure that any resulting new entity that receives your personal information is bound by the terms of this privacy policy, and we will notify all registered users of the change in data controller arrangements via email and a prominent announcement on our website at least 30 days before the transfer of data takes place.

5. International Data Transfers

As a New Zealand based e-commerce business, some of our third-party service providers may operate data servers located outside of New Zealand, in countries that may have different data protection legal frameworks than your local jurisdiction. Whenever we transfer your personal information across international borders, we will put in place appropriate safeguards to ensure that your transferred data receives a level of protection that is consistent with the standards required under New Zealand’s Privacy Act 2020, including the use of standard contractual clauses approved by relevant data protection authorities, or ensuring that the receiving jurisdiction has been recognised as having adequate data protection laws. You may request a full copy of these cross-border data transfer safeguards by contacting our privacy team at the email address listed in this policy.

6. Data Retention Period

We will only retain your personal information for as long as it is strictly necessary to fulfil the specific purposes for which we originally collected it. For different categories of data, our standard retention schedules are as follows:

  • Order related transaction data, including purchase records, billing and shipping information, will be retained for a period of 7 years after the completion of your order, to comply with New Zealand tax and commercial record keeping legal requirements.
  • Registered user account data will be retained for the full duration that you maintain an active account on our platform, and we will securely delete or anonymise all your account data within 30 days after you submit a valid account deletion request.
  • Marketing communication consent records will be retained for as long as you remain subscribed to our newsletter lists, and we will remove your contact details from our marketing database within 7 working days after you submit an opt-out request.
  • Anonymised website browsing analytics data that cannot be linked back to any individual identifiable user may be retained for up to 5 years for long term business trend analysis purposes.

After the relevant retention period expires, we will permanently and securely erase, anonymise, or irreversibly destroy your personal information, in compliance with secure data disposal protocols to prevent any unauthorised future access to your data.

7. Your Data Subject Rights

Under applicable data protection laws, you hold a comprehensive set of rights over the personal information we hold about you. You may exercise any of these rights at any time by submitting a request to our data protection team via email at [email protected], and we will respond to your valid request within no more than 30 calendar days, after verifying your identity to ensure that the request is submitted by the actual data subject. Your rights include:

  • ‌Right of Access‌: You may request to receive a full copy of all personal information that we currently hold about you, along with a detailed explanation of how we have processed your data.
  • ‌Right to Rectification‌: If you find that any of your personal information stored on our platform is inaccurate, incomplete, or out of date, you have the right to request that we correct and update that information without unreasonable delay.
  • ‌Right to Erasure (“Right to be Forgotten”)‌: You may request that we permanently delete all your personal information from our systems, under circumstances where the data is no longer necessary for the original purposes it was collected for, or when you withdraw your consent to the processing, and there are no remaining legal obligations for us to retain the data.
  • ‌Right to Restriction of Processing‌: You have the right to request that we temporarily suspend the processing of your personal information, in scenarios where you dispute the accuracy of the data, the processing is unlawful, or we no longer need the data for our original purposes but you require the data for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims.
  • ‌Right to Data Portability‌: You may request to receive all the personal data you have provided to us, in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, or request that we transfer this data directly to another designated data controller, where technically feasible.
  • ‌Right to Object‌: You have the full right to object to our processing of your personal information for direct marketing purposes, or for processing that we claim is based on our legitimate business interests, at any time, free of charge.
  • ‌Right to Withdraw Consent‌: For any processing activity that you had previously given explicit opt-in consent for, you are entitled to withdraw that consent at any time, which will not affect the lawfulness of any processing that was carried out before your consent was withdrawn.

If you believe that our processing of your personal information has violated applicable data protection regulations, you also have the right to lodge a formal complaint with the New Zealand Office of the Privacy Commissioner, or your local relevant data protection supervisory authority.

8. Data Security Measures

HITCHON INTERNATIONAL LIMITED implements industry standard, multi-layered technical, administrative, and physical security measures to protect your personal information from unauthorised access, accidental loss, alteration, disclosure, or destruction. These protective measures include:

  • All sensitive data transmitted between your browser and our website is encrypted using TLS 1.3 security protocols, to prevent interception during data transmission over the public internet.
  • All user payment data is processed exclusively through fully PCI DSS certified payment gateways, and we never store full credit card numbers or CVV codes on our local servers.
  • Our internal server systems are protected by enterprise grade firewalls, regular vulnerability scanning, and routine security patch updates to block unauthorised intrusion attempts.
  • Our staff are required to complete mandatory data privacy and information security training annually, and access to user personal information is restricted on a need-to-know basis, with strict role-based access controls and activity logging for all internal data access events.
  • We conduct annual independent third party security audits, and maintain a documented data breach response plan that allows us to detect, contain, and notify affected users and relevant regulatory authorities of any potential data security incident within the legally required timeframes.

While we spare no effort to protect your personal information, it is important to note that no data transmission or storage system can be guaranteed to be 100% invulnerable against all potential security threats. In the extremely unlikely event that we identify a personal data breach that poses a high risk to your rights and freedoms, we will notify you directly via email as soon as reasonably possible, in compliance with all applicable legal notification requirements.

9. Children’s Privacy

Our e-commerce website and related services are intended for use by adults aged 18 years or older. We do not knowingly collect any personal information from children under the age of 16. If we become aware that we have inadvertently collected personal data from a child under the relevant minimum age without verifiable parental consent, we will immediately take steps to securely delete that information from all our servers and records. If you believe that we may have collected personal information from a child, please contact us immediately via our official email address so we can resolve the issue promptly.

10. Updates to This Privacy Policy

We reserve the right to review and update this privacy policy from time to time, to reflect changes in our business operations, new regulatory requirements, or updates to our e-commerce service features. When we make material changes to this policy, we will update the “Effective Date” shown at the top of this document, and publish a prominent notification on the homepage of our website www.hitchoninternational.com, as well as send an email notification to all registered users where we hold their valid contact address. Your continued use of our website after the effective date of the updated policy will be deemed as your acknowledgement and acceptance of the revised terms. We encourage you to periodically review this page to stay informed about how we are protecting your personal information.

11. Contact Information for Privacy Enquiries

If you have any questions, concerns, or feedback about this privacy policy, or any aspect of how HITCHON INTERNATIONAL LIMITED manages and processes your personal information, you can reach out to our dedicated privacy management team at any time using the following contact details:

  • Email: [email protected]
  • Postal Address: 10 Syd Bradley Road, Avonhead, Christchurch 8042, New Zealand
  • Telephone: +64 3 357 8979

We aim to respond to all legitimate privacy related enquiries within 10 working days of receiving your message.