Both batteries were off ebay, which may be the actual issue

First battery, a 01AV421, would not be detected. I left it inside the laptop unplugged, and it recently started bloating up in spite of not being used after a couple years.
Second one was this https://www.ebay.com/itm/334622680394. The multiple pics should have tipped me off but the actual thing looks mostly like the top pic which looks oem. This one is detected, but says 0% waiting to charge. I poke around at /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_control_start_threshold and it seems stuck at 0.
Strangely enough it shows a serial number of 800 and a cycle_count of 104. My 2 year old external battery's serial is 9001 and has a cycle_count of 85. Kind of odd.
So basically I am wondering if I should request a refund from the seller, or spend more time testing (I have another old tp25 lying around). And also wondering where to get batteries, it sounds like the way to go is to play ebay roulette with the cheapest ones on there. Or just slap in some kind of filler and rely on the external 6-cell.
My bios version is N1QET87W (1.62) if that makes any difference.