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.