Establishing trust is a critical issue for customers and for new or unknown online retailers. As it is impossible for customers to check products before making online purchases, retailers have more scope for engaging in opportunistic behaviours than they do in the traditional physical retail settings. Customer reviews serve as decision-making aids for customers, potentially building trust towards online retailers. However, for customer reviews to be effective in building trust, customers first need to trust the reviewers. The e-commerce literature has examined the influence of various attributes of customer reviews on customer beliefs, including trust and credibility. However, the attributes of the reviewer profile have todate received limited attention in the literature. This study, therefore, focuses on the influence of reviewer profiles on customer beliefs. Building on similarity-attraction, homophily, and social identity theories, the study examines the influence of the match and mismatch of the demographic characteristics between customers and reviewers on perceived social presence, affective trust, and review credibility. The results indicate that contra the theoretical case for age and gender match between customers and reviewers, no significant positive affect for these match conditions exist. These results, however, follow other offline research that test match based on gender and age and suggest a gap exists between the widely accepted theoretical case and the empirical reality. Although the results here do not follow the apparent theoretical case, they are not exceptional as they follow previous empirical findings. The only exceptional case was found is that when the reviewer is a female and the participant is a male, perceived social presence increased. Additional findings showed that the valence of customer reviews had no significant influence on perceived social presence, affective trust, or review credibility. Affective trust is also found to mediate the relationship between perceived social presence and perceived review credibility.