Cookie Policy

Welcome to TheOnlineCity. We want you to have the best experience possible when hunting for the latest vouchers and top-tier deals. To make that happen, we use cookies and similar small technologies (like pixels) to help our website work properly and to understand how you use it.

This policy sits alongside our Privacy Policy, which explains more about how we handle your personal data generally.

What are cookies?

Think of a cookie as a tiny digital note that a website asks your browser to store on your device. When you come back to visit us, your browser sends this note back to us. It helps us remember things like your login details or your favourite deal categories, so you don't have to start from scratch every single time.

We also use a few similar technologies — such as pixels and local storage — which do comparable jobs. Where we say "cookies" in this policy, we mean all of these.

Why do we use them?

Without cookies, TheOnlineCity wouldn't be able to "recognise" you. Every time you clicked a new deal, the website would treat you like a complete stranger. This would make browsing quite a chore! We use cookies to:

• Keep things running smoothly: Ensuring you stay logged in and that the site remains secure.
• Improve our service: Learning which parts of our site are popular and which might need a bit of a tweak.
• Support our platform: As a deals site, we link out to retailers through affiliate partners to keep our service free for you. We don't set tracking cookies for this ourselves — more on how affiliate links work below.

How to manage your choices

You're in the driver's seat. The only non-essential cookies we set are analytics cookies, and we'll ask for your consent before setting them. You can change your mind at any time by visiting our Cookie Settings or by adjusting your browser settings.

Please note that if you disable cookies via your browser, some parts of TheOnlineCity might not work quite as you expect. Also, while some browsers have a "Do Not Track" feature, we don't currently change our cookie practices based on that signal, simply because there isn't a universal standard for how it should work.

The different types of cookies we use

1. Strictly Necessary Cookies

These are essential for the website to function. They enable basic features like security, network management, and keeping you logged in. Without these, we simply couldn't provide our services. Because they're essential, these don't require your consent — but we still want to be transparent about them.

Cookie Name	Provider	Purpose	Duration
the-online-city-session	TheOnlineCity (first-party)	Keeps you logged in and maintains your secure session as you move around the site	Session (expires after a period of inactivity)
XSRF-TOKEN	TheOnlineCity (first-party)	A security token that protects against cross-site request forgery, helping ensure requests genuinely come from you	Session (expires after a period of inactivity)

2. Performance & Analytics Cookies

These help us understand how visitors move around our site, so we can optimise its performance and content. We only set these if you've given us consent.

We use Google Analytics (GA4) for this. These are the cookies it sets:

Cookie Name	Provider	Purpose	Duration
_ga	Google Analytics	Distinguishes individual users	2 years (browsers may cap this at ~13 months)
_ga_<container-id>	Google Analytics	Maintains session state	2 years
_gid	Google Analytics	Distinguishes users over a short period	24 hours
_gat / _dc_gtm_<id>	Google Analytics / Google Tag Manager	Limits how often requests are sent	1 minute

3. Affiliate Links and Advertising

As a deals site, many of our links take you to a retailer (like a high-street shop or online store) through an affiliate network such as Awin, Commission Junction (CJ), or Webgains. If you go on to buy something after clicking, we earn a small commission — at no extra cost to you. This is how we keep TheOnlineCity free.

Importantly, we don't set any advertising or tracking cookies ourselves. Our affiliate links are plain links: when you click one, you're redirected to the retailer, and it's the retailer or its affiliate network that may set a cookie on your device to attribute the sale. Those cookies are set on their domains, under their own cookie and privacy policies, which we'd encourage you to review. Such cookies typically last around 30 days.

Any points you earn for clicking deals on TheOnlineCity are recorded by us on our own servers at the moment you click — they don't rely on these third-party cookies at all.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time to reflect changes in technology or the law. We recommend checking this page occasionally to stay informed. This version is effective from 2026-05-01.

Questions?

If you have any questions about how we use cookies, please get in touch at [email protected].