E-commerce livestreaming has been widely researched in recent years from the perspectives of platform development, marketing strategy and linguistic features. However, scant attention has been given to how actions are organized in a live stream. To address this gap, this study adopted a qualitative approach to investigate POP MART U.S. SHOP livestreams on TikTok through the lens of multimodal interaction analysis. It systematically examined how multiple communicative modes are coordinated to construct actions across different interactive contexts and found that communicative modes are mobilized in accordance with the communicative purpose of each livestreaming stage. Rather than being realized through a simple accumulation of isolated modes, livestreaming interaction is constructed through the dynamic coordination of multiple lower-level actions, which together shape foregrounded higher-level actions. Moreover, modal density varies across different actions and stages, which is determined not merely by the duration of a single mode but by the intensity and complexity of modal coordination. Based on these findings, this study is expected to extend the application of multimodal interaction analysis to e-commerce and offer practical guidance for Chinese brands to optimize their livestreaming communication strategies in overseas markets.

Keywords: Multimodal interaction analysis, higher-level actions, modal density, e-commerce live-streaming, POP MART, TikTok.