BUZZ BEAT MEDIA

Ahead of Black Friday, new research finds 43% of consumers have deleted or abandoned an email over authenticity concerns while more than half favor brands with verified inbox logos

DigiCert, a global leader in intelligent trust, today released findings from a global consumer study revealing that fear of fake emails is costing retailers a shopper’s attention, and potentially their business. The data shows 43% of consumers deleted or abandoned an email in the past year because they weren’t sure it was genuine. Seventeen percent delayed a purchase, and more than 1 in 10 shopped with another retailer.

The findings highlight a challenge ahead of Black Friday: just 3% of shoppers say they would open or click an offer if they couldn’t verify it came from the brand. More than half would delete, ignore, or report it.

“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. “Retailers can help by making their emails harder to impersonate and easier to recognize. When shoppers hesitate because they don’t know who to trust, even a legitimate offer can end up in the trash.”

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 common impersonation: more than half of suspicious-email recipients saw messages claiming to come from a delivery provider.

Those messages can be especially convincing during the holiday shopping rush. Nearly 3 in 10 shoppers judge an email’s authenticity partly by whether they were expecting it, which gives a fake delivery notice an advantage when it lands at exactly the moment a shopper is expecting a real one.

Among U.K. shoppers who received suspicious emails, 63% reported messages pretending to be from delivery companies, the highest share among countries surveyed. U.S. consumers were the most likely to say they received suspicious emails frequently, at 45%.

Confident shoppers are still getting caught

Seven in 10 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 now pass.

The gap between confidence and experience is especially striking among shoppers aged 25 to 34. While 82% felt confident they could recognize a scam email, 59% had clicked, paid, or shared details before realizing an email was fraudulent.

Clear signs of authenticity can help

Verification changes the outcome, and its pull is growing, with 54% of consumers now choosing the brand that shows 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.

But awareness remains a hurdle. Four in 10 consumers do not know verified inbox logos exist, rising to nearly half (48%) in Germany.

“Is this real?” now extends beyond the inbox

Consumer doubts also reach product listings. More than a third of shoppers have decided not to buy because they were unsure whether an image or video was genuine, and a quarter say such uncertainty has reduced their trust in retailers.

Product images carrying content credentials showing their origin were more likely to earn trust and prompt a purchase than the same images without them. At checkout, half of consumers said a trust mark confirming who operates the website would make them more likely to complete a purchase.

How verification works

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 the rule is satisfied by a policy that only monitors, 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, so legitimate messages are easier for shoppers to recognize.

Read the full findings in the report and read the blog for a closer look at what the results mean for brands and consumers.

Methodology

The findings are based on an independent survey conducted by Vitreous World on behalf of DigiCert in October 2026. The study surveyed 6,000 consumers aged 18 and over: 2,000 in the United States, 2,000 in the United Kingdom, 1,000 in Germany, 800 in Australia, and 200 in New Zealand.

The year-over-year brand-choice comparison covers the four markets included in both studies, using 5,019 respondents from 2025 and a weighted base of 5,000 respondents from 2026. Germany, added to the study in 2026, is excluded from this comparison.

About DigiCert

DigiCert is a global leader in intelligent trust. We protect the digital world by ensuring the security, privacy, and authenticity of every interaction. Our AI-powered DigiCert ONE platform unifies PKI, DNS, and certificate lifecycle management to secure infrastructure, software, devices, messages, and AI content, agents, and models. Learn why more than 125,000 organizations, including 90% of the Fortune 500, choose DigiCert to stop today’s threats and prepare for a quantum-safe future at www.digicert.com.

*Cover Photo/Thumbnail Photo From DigiCert