Retail
Winning (and Keeping) Shopper Trust - The Retail Email Threat You Can't See
How DMARC and BIMI Can Protect and Elevate Retail Brands in 2025
Retail Threats
Are Global
Email is essential to online retail, but it is also a common target for phishing and spoofing attacks. Cybercriminals can impersonate trusted brands to steal credentials, commit fraud, and damage customer trust. DMARC is the only protocol that can stop bad actors from sending spoofed emails using your domain. Without it, anyone can pretend to be you in the inbox.
Global Threat Map: Origins of
Spoofed Email in Retail
Retailers are a top target for email spoofing worldwide. Here’s what that looked like in the past year—and how Valimail stopped it. Every dot on the globe represents a source of spoofed retail email. Valimail kept those threats out of inboxes, protecting brands and customers alike.
What’s Powering Retail Email
Retailers rely on a diverse mix of platforms to deliver critical messages—from marketing automation and CRM systems to transactional email services. Tools like SendGrid, Shopify, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and many others power everything from promotions to purchase confirmations. Valimail makes it simple to automatically identify these legitimate platforms and authorize them to send on your behalf. By drawing a clear line between trusted senders and malicious impostors, Valimail helps ensure that customers receive the messages they expect, all while fraudulent mail gets stopped at the door.
Improved Branding,
Improved Trust
Brand Images for Message Identification (BIMI) is the email inbox logo standard that allows good senders to boost trust and boost engagement. This allows retailers an increased opportunity to show off their brand and better connect with email subscribers.
Mailbox Compliance:
A Wake-Up Call for Retailers
Email continues to be a critical driver of sales and customer engagement in online retail, but it also remains the most exploited vector for cyberattacks. Threat actors frequently impersonate trusted brands to launch phishing campaigns, using increasingly realistic tactics made possible by Artificial Intelligence. These messages often bypass traditional defenses, undermining consumer trust and exposing businesses to reputational and financial risk. The prevalence of transactional email in retail, such as shipping notifications, order confirmations, and password resets, makes the sector particularly vulnerable to this type of abuse.
DMARC was developed to address this threat by preventing unauthorized use of your domain in email communications. While 95% of retail domains have published DMARC records, implementation often falls short of full protection. Nearly 30% of retailers still use a “p=none” policy, which signals that no enforcement action should be taken on suspicious email, allowing spoofed messages to go undetected. Additionally, six percent of retail domains have not enabled DMARC reporting, leaving organizations blind to how their domains are being used (or misused) across the internet.
Despite this, retailers are in a strong position to improve. By enabling reporting, moving to enforcement-level policies (quarantine or reject) and continuously monitoring domain usage, retailers can significantly reduce spoofing risk. These actions not only safeguard customer communications but also protect brand equity, and means that DMARC remains a future-proof foundation for email security in the retail space.
Trusted by retail businesses...
Valimail has completely transformed how we manage email authentication. Their automation gives us confidence, and their customer support team has been incredible—especially during urgent, high-stakes moments.
Sara Diaz
Senior Manager of Information Security & IT, Glossier
Retail Email Authentication Checklist
Protecting your brand in the inbox isn’t a one-and-done task: it’s a progression. These are the steps retailers should take to secure their domains and earn customer trust. It starts with visibility: monitoring all email activity to understand who is sending on your behalf. From there, retailers should ensure that every legitimate message is properly authenticated and that only approved email platforms are authorized to send. The next step is enforcement—moving your DMARC policy to “reject” so spoofed mail is blocked outright. Finally, you can take authentication further by displaying your verified logo with BIMI, reinforcing your brand and signaling trust with every email.
Is Your Retail Email Infrastructure at Risk?
Retail email ecosystems are uniquely complex — storefronts, franchisees, employees, loyalty programs, marketing platforms, and third-party services all send on your behalf. Each connection adds another potential point of failure.
The Retail Email Risk Assessment uncovers blind spots across your email infrastructure, from unauthorized senders to missing DMARC enforcement. Take the assessment to reveal hidden vulnerabilities, compare your risk to industry benchmarks, and get personalized recommendations to reduce exposure.
DMARC in retail: How to secure your customer communications
Learn how retail brands use DMARC to protect revenue, boost deliverability, and build trust. This blog breaks down the costs of email fraud — and how to stop them.
Explore all Valimail
has to offer
Go one step further than visibility…Take action! Reach DMARC enforcement faster. Stay compliant with evolving sender requirements. All while protecting your brand.