Fake emails are costing retailers shoppers’ attention before Black Friday, with 43% of consumers having deleted or abandoned a message in the past year because they doubted it was genuine, according to a new global study from DigiCert.
Key Takeaways
- 43% of consumers deleted or abandoned an email over authenticity doubts, and just 3% would click an offer they could not verify.
- Fake delivery notices are the most common impersonation, reported by more than half of those who received suspicious emails.
- 54% of consumers now pick the brand showing a verified inbox logo, up from 49% in 2025.
The survey found that 17% of respondents delayed a purchase because of the doubt, while more than one in ten shopped with another retailer. Only 3% of shoppers said they would open or click an offer they could not verify came from the brand, and more than half would delete, ignore or report it.
Fake delivery emails top the list
Nearly 90% of consumers received a suspicious email in the past year, and 42% acted on one. Delivery companies were the most commonly impersonated, with more than half of those who received suspicious emails seeing messages claiming to come from a delivery provider.
The timing matters during the holiday shopping rush. Nearly three in ten shoppers judge an email’s authenticity partly by whether they were expecting it, which gives a fake delivery notice an advantage when a real parcel is on its way.
Among shoppers in the UK who received suspicious emails, 63% reported messages pretending to be from delivery companies, the highest share of any country surveyed. US consumers were the most likely to say they received suspicious emails frequently, at 45%.
Confidence does not stop the clicks
Seven in ten shoppers believe they could spot a professionally written scam email, yet 38% still rely on spelling and grammar to judge one, a check that AI-written fakes can now pass. The gap is widest among shoppers aged 25 to 34: 82% felt confident they could recognise a scam, but 59% had clicked, paid or shared details before realising an email was fraudulent.
“Shoppers shouldn’t have to play detective every time an offer lands in their inbox,” said Al Iverson, Industry Research and Community Engagement Lead at Valimail, a DigiCert company. He added that retailers can help by making their emails harder to impersonate and easier to recognise.
Verified inbox logos sway buyers
Visible proof of authenticity appears to change behaviour. The study found 54% of consumers would choose the brand displaying its official logo in the inbox over a competitor, up from 49% in 2025. Shoppers shown a retail email with a verified logo were more likely to buy than those shown the same email without one, and three-quarters said it made them feel safer.
Awareness remains a hurdle, however. Four in ten consumers do not know verified inbox logos exist, rising to nearly half in Germany.
Doubts also extend to product listings. More than a third of shoppers have decided not to buy because they were unsure whether an image or video was genuine. Images carrying content credentials that show their origin were more likely to earn trust and prompt a purchase, and half of consumers said a trust mark confirming who operates a website would make them more likely to complete checkout.
DMARC enforcement is the missing step
DMARC is a policy a brand publishes that tells email providers to reject messages pretending to come from its domain. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft already require bulk senders to have one, but a policy that only monitors satisfies the rule, and only enforcement stops the fakes.
DigiCert and Valimail help retailers reach DMARC enforcement and display a verified brand logo in participating inboxes through DigiCert Mark Certificates.
The findings come from an October 2026 survey of 6,000 consumers aged 18 and over, conducted by Vitreous World on behalf of DigiCert. Respondents were drawn from the US, UK, Germany, Australia and New Zealand.
