Marks & Spencer has been ranked as the UK’s most trusted retailer in 2025, despite the crippling cyberattack that disrupted trading for several weeks, according to research from data and analytics company GlobalData.

M&S’s distinctive own-brand ranges helped pushed it into the top spot, with shoppers’ difficulty in finding alternative products elsewhere during the outage reinforcing the perception that the retailer offers products that are genuinely hard to replace.

John Lewis & Partners, Tesco, Amazon, and Sainsbury’s complete the top five most trusted retailers, according to GlobalData’s research of 2,000 UK shoppers.

Four of the five retailers are British, with GlobalData suggesting that heritage brands benefit from familiarity and perceived accountability to UK shoppers. It identifies strong domestic brand identity as a key reason why M&S has retained customer confidence and limited reputational damage.

However, the retailer faces stiff competition, Aliya Siddika, Associate Retail Analyst at GlobalData warned.

“Marks & Spencer’s narrow lead in consumer trust over John Lewis & Partners is not guaranteed to remain in 2026. John Lewis & Partners has the infrastructure to communicate its quality and value-for-money message more clearly with its revived ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’ promise, which could help it overtake Marks & Spencer in the future,” commented Siddika.

John Lewis ranked second despite having a smaller store footprint, highlighting the strength of its proposition and the potential for further momentum.

Consistent quality and clear value for money underpin consumer trust, with 84% and 81% of consumers, respectively, citing these factors as the leading drivers of trust in retailers. That trust is further strengthened when retailers deliver consistently positive experiences across stores and channels, backed by reliable customer service.

“The most-trusted UK retailers are those that translate quality and value into clear, customer-facing signals. Retailers must offer distinctive, high-quality own-brand ranges that feel genuinely hard to replace. Shoppers also respond to credible value cues such as Tesco’s Finest range, which, paired with Clubcard Prices, makes the quality and value trade-off easy to see at the shelf edge,” concluded Siddika.