Volusion Software Cookies

Mmmm, cookies. 🍪🍪🍪 Your website uses them all the time — but not the ooey-gooey, fresh-baked kind. Computer cookies help websites obtain information about who’s visiting, kind of like welcoming them with a plate of fresh oatmeal pecans. Are you hungry for more?

What are Cookies?

Cookies are small files placed on a user’s computer browser when they visit a website. They hold a small amount of information that tells something about that user such as the pages they visited on a website, how many times they visited the website and how much time they spent there. This helps website owners understand who their audience is and what they are looking at on their site.

For transparency reasons, EU merchants will want to provide their customers with a list of the cookies used on their website. See the following list of cookies used by Volusion store software and a brief explanation of each cookie’s use. Just think: you can have all of these cookies without worrying about breaking your diet!

European Cookie Legislation

There is a piece of privacy legislation known as the “cookie law” that requires websites to get consent from visitors to store or retrieve any information on a computer, smartphone or tablet. All websites targeted towards European Union (EU) citizens are now expected to comply with the law.

Our software is capable of complying with all European Cookie Legislation, provided that you fully disclose all cookies and update necessary store settings. Please understand that we can’t provide legal advice on the best practice for obtaining permissions required under the law. You can see the Information Commissioner's Office website for official guidance on complying with the EU e-Privacy Directive.

You can use the summary of Volusion software cookies below to determine which non-essential cookies to disable or disclose to customers.

Strictly Necessary Cookies

If you were going to a cookie party (yep, that’s a thing), you’d be sure to find some of the chocolate chip variety. They’re a classic, a staple. Well, there are some cookies of the computer kind that you similarly can’t go without. They enable the Volusion storefront to function, and cannot be disabled without crippling the shopping cart and browsing experience for customers.

ASPSESSIONIDXXXXXXXX

Easy for you to say! Actually, all of those crazy x’s are there for a reason. This is an ASP session cookie that identifies the customer’s current session with the server. This cookie does not contain any content other than the session ID (indicated in the cookie name by "XXXXXXXX")

Vsettings

This cookie stores any site settings for that session. It does not contain any content other than the session settings. For example, if a customer selects to display 24 results per page on Search Results and Category pages, this cookie will store that setting throughout the customer’s browsing experience.

Slt

This cookie is a session login token that gets set when a customer logs into your store. It’s necessary for your customers to be able to log in, and allows them to check out as a returning customer.

CartID5

This cookie allows customers to add items to their shopping cart. An ecommerce essential! Without it, customers couldn’t proceed to the checkout page.

Functionality Cookies

You know when you veer from your standard cookie recipe to add some enhancements like nuts or spices? Well, functionality cookies are kind of like that. They’re used for some of the more special features available with Volusion. You can disable these features to prevent these cookies from being stored on customers’ browsers.

History50

This cookie stores the ProductIDs of the last items viewed by a customer on your store. It’s used to control the My Recent History functionality, which can be set to appear at the bottom of all product pages as your customers browse your site.

If you want to disable this feature and prevent the cookie from being placed on your customer’s computer …

Go to Inventory > Products
Click the three-dot actions menu icon
Select All Products Settings
Scroll to find the variables titled Display Product History and Enable Recent History Images and disable them

_atuvc

This cookie comes from AddThis. Volusion's integration with AddThis allows share buttons (Twitter, email, etc.) to appear beneath your product images. To disable this share feature and prevent the cookie from being placed on your customer’s computer:

Go to Inventory > Products
Click the three-dot actions menu icon
Select All Products Settings
Scroll to find the variable titled Enable Share Button and disable it

Functionality cookies – Affiliate Program

Just like Girl Scouts sell cookies to help the troop (Thin Mints, anyone?), affiliates help you sell your products, and they have special cookies of all their own.

Referrer

This cookie is used to indicate the site from which the customer navigated to the Volusion store. This helps merchants see where customers are coming from!

AffiliateID

This cookie is used to tell the Volusion store which Affiliate should get credit/commission for items purchased through the Affiliate link.

AffiliateTrackedToday

This cookie is used to ensure that the affiliate link does not get click-through credit on each page load.

Additionally, you can prevent long-term tracking via cookies by making a simple change in your store Admin Area:

Go to Marketing > Affiliates
Select Affiliate Settings from the Filter menu
Enter "0" as the Value for the Affiliate Track Days field
Click Save

LocalStorage for Product Comparison Functionality

LocalStorage is an alternate Javascript-based method to store local data without using cookies. The Volusion software uses LocalStorage to enable the Product Comparison feature.

VCompareIDs

This is the key of the LocalStorage object used by the Product Comparison feature in Volusion.

This LocalStorage stores the product codes of the products that customers select to Compare when they’re browsing your store. This way, they can see how their selected products stack up later, when they click Compare.

To disable the Product Comparison feature and prevent the LocalStorage object from being set on your customer’s browser:

Go to Design > Product Display Settings
Scroll to the bottom and expand the Product Comparison Page section of the page
Deselect both Enable Product Comparison for Categories and Enable Product Comparison for Search Results
Click Save

Summary

When it comes to capturing customer data, European merchants must play by the compliance rules. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles. The above information can help you to comply with all European Cookie Legislation. To get your fill of cookies, you might also consider checking out "Obtaining Explicit Consent for Cookies" and "Third-Party Cookies.”