Webshop email deliverability: why order confirmations land in spam
A missed newsletter costs a click; a missed order confirmation costs a support ticket, a chargeback risk and a customer who thinks you kept the money. Webshops have the most to lose from deliverability — and structurally the messiest sending setup.
Why webshops specifically struggle
A typical Danish webshop sends from: the shop platform (order mail), an ESP (newsletters), a helpdesk, an invoicing system, and sometimes a review or logistics tool. Five systems, five authentication setups — and one shared domain reputation. One unaligned stream drags down inbox placement for the others, and the SPF record quietly accumulates includes toward the 10-lookup wall.
The pattern that works: keep transactional mail (orders, invoices) on the root domain with strict alignment; move marketing volume to a subdomain (nyhedsbrev.shop.dk) with its own SPF/DKIM — separating reputations so a heavy campaign day cannot hurt order mail; give every tool its custom-domain DKIM (Shopify, Klaviyo, Mailchimp and the helpdesks all support it — it is always the "verify your domain" step people skip).
The seasonal trap and the checklist
Black Friday quadruples your volume overnight — exactly when Gmail's bulk-sender thresholds and spam-rate limits bite hardest, and when a permerror caused by lookup #11 costs the most. Audit BEFORE the peak: run the full check on root and sending subdomains, confirm every platform's DKIM is custom-domain, watch the SPF lookup counter, and get DMARC to at least quarantine while reports are clean. Then let monitoring watch it daily — the week you have no time for DNS is precisely the week it will break.
Free tools that help
- SPF Surveyor: Visualize the full SPF include tree and count DNS lookups against the limit of 10.
- DKIM Inspector: Find published DKIM keys across common selectors and analyze key strength.