Metaverse commerce is reshaping e-commerce by offering immersive and interactive shopping experiences. Sales avatars, defined as digital representations of firm frontline employees in metaverse commerce, play critical roles in delivering real-time and interactive experiences. Drawing on the theory of affordances and the needs-affordances-features framework, this study investigates how the facial expressions of sales avatars (smiling vs. crying) influence consumer avatars’ interaction outcomes and the underlying mechanisms through subcultural appeal. Further, we test when the mechanism by which sales avatars’ facial expression leads to consumer interaction outcomes via subcultural appeal is amplified or weakened depending on sales avatar’s anthropomorphism. We conducted four experiments in which consumers were exposed to virtual commerce contexts that we built on the VRChat metaverse platform. The results reveal that unlike real-world interactions, crying sales avatars compared to smiling sales avatars elicit higher intentions to interact with the sales avatar, purchase a virtual item from the sales avatar, and spread positive WOM about the experience. This counterintuitive effect is driven by consumers’ heightened perceptions of subcultural appeal in the crying sales avatar context. However, when sales avatars exhibited high anthropomorphism (human-like vs. cartoon-like), the positive effect of the crying expression weakened. These findings provide actionable insights into how to strategically leverage sales avatars’ facial expressions in highly immersive metaverse commerce, where consumers’ desire for subcultural values is relatively high.