Meet the founder
joe yates.
Founder and CEO of Somerce — the official TikTok Shop Partner agency behind the platform's $2.7m record LIVE. Running agencies since 17. Named Video Content Sharing CEO of the Year 2025.
Founder and CEO of Somerce — the official TikTok Shop Partner agency behind the platform's $2.7m record LIVE. Running agencies since 17. Named Video Content Sharing CEO of the Year 2025.
Joe started his first digital agency at seventeen, learning the craft the only way that sticks: with his own clients, his own mistakes and his own P&L.
He sold that first agency at twenty-one, then built and exited a marketing agency by 2021 before working as a fractional CMO for e-commerce brands.
As TikTok Shop opened up the UK, Joe founded Somerce on a single conviction: social commerce would be won by operators who owned the whole engine — studios, hosts, affiliates and the data — not by agencies renting pieces of it.
Joe launched LiveHost, Somerce's own live-commerce platform — booking, benchmarking and championships for the host roster — now a leading tool in live shopping globally.
Just over two years in, Somerce is an official TikTok Shop Partner with £100m+ GMV managed across 80+ brands, the platform's $2.7m record single LIVE, 250 vetted hosts, 12 studios across London and Manchester, and operations in eight TikTok Shop markets.
Every LIVE, brief and trading call runs on the numbers. The record wasn't luck; it was a run-of-show, rehearsed.
Views don't pay anyone. Somerce measures itself on the number the client's board measures: revenue through the shop.
Studios, hosts, training and the platform that runs them — built in-house, so the operation compounds instead of renting.
Where Joe talks about what's actually working on TikTok Shop.
The brand, the market, the goal — bring the ambition and he'll bring the playbook that set the record.