A mistake, or a business strategy?

I was looking for a very specific toy for my kid's birthday, and Toy Adventures was the only place in South Africa to stock it. The product page showed a picture of the desired model and the title matched, so I bought it and waited for it to arrive. It did not arrive, in its stead I received a different toy from the same series, too late for the birthday boy (I picked up a consolation gift for him from Amazon.com, it actually took the same number of days to arrive as the shipment from Pretoria).

On closer inspection, I noticed that the product had actually been resealed and there had been no mention of it not being brand new.

When I complained, I was told it had been clearly marked as part of an "assortment", but by the time they told me this the product page had been taken down so I could not verify this. I was then informed that "Please note that this products description States the following: Assortment available" was stated in the product description; my English is pretty good, and that doesn't sound like "this product is part of an assortment and if you don't specify the model you want in the notes on the purchase form you'll get what we feel like giving you" to me.

They refused to cover the return shipping, and then proceeded to give me the wrong delivery address for the return which caused problems for the courier and stretched out the return delivery to weeks instead of days.

Their only saving grace is that they eventually did issue the refund, but overall this experience was awful, took forever to sort out, and I will never be purchasing anything from them again.