Marks & Spencer has been ranked as the UK’s most trusted retailer in 2025, despite the impact of a major cyber attack in April that forced the company to suspend online orders for nearly seven weeks.
The ranking is based on a survey of 2,000 UK consumers conducted in November 2025 by data and analytics company GlobalData. Respondents were asked to name up to three UK retailers they considered the most trustworthy.
Marks & Spencer topped the list with 19% of the vote, narrowly ahead of John Lewis at 18%. Tesco and Amazon followed jointly on 16%, while Sainsbury’s ranked fifth with 11%.
According to the findings, the difficulty shoppers experienced in finding comparable alternatives during the period when Marks & Spencer’s website was offline reinforced perceptions that the retailer offers products that are genuinely hard to replace. The company’s efforts to restore services and offer customer discounts following the disruption were also seen as strengthening its reputation for reliability and value.
Aliyah Siddika, associate retail analyst at GlobalData, said Marks & Spencer’s slim lead over John Lewis & Partners was not guaranteed to continue into 2026. She noted that John Lewis & Partners had the infrastructure to communicate its quality and value-for-money proposition more clearly through the revival of its “Never Knowingly Undersold” promise, which could allow it to overtake Marks & Spencer in future rankings.
She added that John Lewis’s second-place ranking, despite having a smaller store footprint, highlighted the strength of its proposition and its potential for further momentum. Siddika also said Marks & Spencer would need to maintain a strong focus on security while continuing to promote its distinctive, quality-led own-brand ranges in order to retain consumer trust.
The survey found that high-quality products were the most important driver of trust, cited by 84% of respondents, followed closely by value for money at 81%. Customer service and clear price promises were each identified by 74% of respondents, while consistency across physical stores and online channels was highlighted by 73%.
Siddika said the most trusted UK retailers were those that translated quality and value into clear, customer-facing signals. She added that retailers needed to offer distinctive, high-quality own-brand ranges that felt genuinely difficult to replace, while also using credible value cues—such as Tesco’s Finest range combined with Clubcard pricing—to make the quality and value proposition easy for shoppers to understand at the shelf edge.
