Are you arguing that it isn't deceptive or are you arguing that the deception is OK?

No more and no less deceptive than any other brand. He has not said he is using someone else's brand just making one up. Fun fact, all brands are essentially made up.

Wildly deceptive marketing is common, yes, but I don't see how that makes it less bad.

I honestly don't see what the deception is.

Huh, interesting, that's not the answer I expected, let's unpack that. Could you give me a typical user story from your point of view? I've tried to come up with one (A, below) but I just can't make it convincing. I have also included what I suspect a typical user story looks like and labeled it B. Of course, B is rife with deception.

A: Alice clicks on an ad for Lens Luxury glasses, likes the picture of the product, and orders them on account of the $100 price-tag being roughly consistent with what she expects to pay for said level of quality, despite the fact that she sees the same sunglasses at a $10 price point every time she goes through a checkout aisle. She receives the glasses and is happy with them. Dave the Dropshipper earns $97 for providing the service of connecting customer and product.

B: Bob notices his sunglasses are losing their coating. He knows he could go to Walmart or Amazon or the nearest convenience store and pick up a pair produced in China under conditions of extreme cost optimization and dubious labor / environmental / trade conditions, but on account of recently hearing some horror stories he holds out. A few days later, he starts seeing Lens Luxury Facebook ads and Instagram / Blog content marketing. Unaware of the prevalence of "content marketing," he develops the impression that Lens Luxury is an emerging trendy brand and visits their website, which has an Italian name, pictures of a factory in Italy, smiling Italian models, and copy that strongly suggests the glasses are made in Italy without literally saying it. The site has sections about environmental impact and labor fairness (100% worker owned!) and a pricetag to match -- at least, as far as Bob understands sunglasses pricing, which isn't far. He decides to support this nonexistent picturesque Italian company, and orders the sunglasses. Six months later, the hinges rust out, and he is alarmed to find that Lens Luxury has vanished from the internet, leaving behind a trail of angry blogposts from customers who have experienced the same problem. He learns that it wasn't an Italian company after all and makes an angry post on facebook warning his friends to not do business with Lens Luxury, blissfully unaware that they are now doing business under the name Style Sunglasses.

Yeah, B is pretty deceptive. But you have invented all the deceptive parts.

This reminds me of being angry at your spouse for what they did in a dream.

I asked for your help in making scenario A plausible. You ignored me and complained that my fictional scenarios were fictional.

I take this as an admission that you cannot imagine a scenario in which the marketing practices you claim are non-deceptive are in fact non-deceptive. That says it all, really.

OP invented every part. The made-up nitpicking, a la dreamland, is in your response. OP did a good job illustrating his position. Both scenarios sounded bad to me, as neither operates on profit by margins, but instead on the hiding of information from the consumer.

One thing I learned from that operation was how hard it is to honour returns. A return cost many, many times the cost of such cheap product.

I had cases of returns, and angry reviews because people didn't like even single, barely visible scratch on the glass, which I myself somehow overlooked.

Not honouring returns was a 100% sure way to get kicked off ebay, and amazon 10 years ago, and maybe even more today. This is what I learned on forums of people doing small business on ebay that I read prior to starting.

Knowing that, I picked products from samples that survived most abuse, and had hardest, and best looking surface finish.

Even with all of that, you can't do anything about returns made for no other reason than "I simply don't like it"

I'm currently listening to Bernie Sanders Filibuster (Millennial/LoFi edition) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm6qy_9E0rY , it sounds so close to what you wrote (but extended) that I read it with Sanders' voice.

The deception of putting a foreign sounding name on a domestic product has been normalized, if nothing else.

Häagen-Dazs being a famous example but far from the only one.

@burningfrog

I believe you when you say that you 'honestly dont see what the con is' and agree with other comments 'this is totally normal.

So perhaps it helps bridge our divide if I ask you to imagine me as someone who is a little more sensitive to deception, games, exploitation, manipulation.

I understand right now you might again say 'but non of this is me and you have still made no point'. We are probably wired differently, or have differing world views about why live, what purpose money might serve, something along those lines.

I am impressed with your creativity and business 'tenacity'. But from where I/my mind/folks i associate with (im the kind of 30s person who says 'folks') these steps to 'create' 'value' are at best an engineering of perceptions.

We could talk about how everything engineers our perceptions, all the way to the style of clothing, culture, language, how tall are you. But my reaction was meant to focus, empathetically, on a conscious and intelligent effort to convince presumably uninformed or ill equipped people to trust your presentation, its integrity etc and spend money.

Its about a hard to describe heart felt opposition not to the pursuit of profits but opposition to a maneuvering to assign artificial value to things. I think these practices tarnish the good image of a persons business intellect, and their position on more human interests, and capitalism, and even further a culture.

It almost feels like a good v evil thing. Will we G: identify known value or suspected opportunities for value and produce/consume accordingly, whether it is for entertainment, health whatever E: provide a platform for maximum profit, engineering consumers and humanity into some sort of monster hamster wheel of feeding our masters. I get this is a huge reach from our original point but thought perhaps the very extended image would entertain and lighten my attempt to clarify. Ultimately whichever way it goes i guess the sun will eventually die.