I'd have sent him a text saying "do you want it or not? If you do you'd better stop being abusive". And if he carried on being abusive just not sent it him and keep his money. In fact I might have just done that anyway.
I sold a PS3 for a mate recently, and a guy who bid on it started sending questions about it AFTER he'd won it, and then left his phone number saying could I contact him. I did, and he basically then said that although he'd won the auction he didn't want it any more. I got quite angry on the phone with him, basically saying that "well you shouldn't have bid on it then should you", and he came up with some cock and bull story about his wife having already bought one for his kid and he hadn't spoken to her for two weeks so he didn't know - was very apologetic and offered to pay me for my expense. "How much for your
ebay fees?" he asked. "£20", said I. He sounded shocked, and offered me a tenner. "Twenty quid." I repeated. he eventually paid me £20, obviously in the hope of not getting an unpaid item strike (which are obviously still going to exist). I was going to leave it at that, but then my mate noticed he was SELLING a PS3 of his own, so we came to the conclusion that he was simply price fixing, and just wanted to ruin my auction so it wouldn't be in competition with his own.
I wasn't having that, so I left negative feedback even though he'd left positive, and gave him an unpaid item strike and obviously kept his £20.
I think the best system would be transactional feedback - i.e. you can both leave feedback, but both feedbacks aren't visible to each other or anyone else until BOTH have left the feedback.
But I think the step that's been taken is better than nothing, because the way the system was working with sellers able to leave feedback based on the buiyers' feedback was a joke.
Also, I recommend some rules for ebay:
1) only ever deal with paypal
2) describe all faults of an item
3) if possible, don't ask a seller a question which enables them to skew their answer based on what you want to hear (i.e. don't reveal which answer you want to hear) - e.g. 'what features has it got' rather than 'has it got feature X'
4) always use 'seller's standard rate', rather than one of the preset postal service indicators, e.g. 'parcelforce 24' - they don't correspond to anything anyway, and it gives rise to the one thing that really annoys my bro -when people say 'ah -i notice it only cost you £3.24 to post it but you charged me a fiver', can i have a refund of £1.76 please?' NO! it's to cover my expenses in going to the bloody post office. So therefore, put something along the lines of 'postal charges include additional administration costs' or something along those lines.
and, going by your experience, (5) always post it and dont' arrange to deliver it...
When i sold my beemer, I said I'd deliver it, with a charge per mile, and the woman who won it wanted it lived in bloody Ayr and wanted it delivered there! I said 'no chance'. We eventually compromised on meeting in darlington and she paid my train ticket home.