I spent £7 on Amazon mystery parcels and felt like a mug when I opened them

Liverpool's Trade Outlet store is a huge warehouse offering customers the chance to pick up a bargain from shelves filled with unclaimed Amazon items. The Brunswick Business Park store also has a section dedicated to 'mystery parcels' which shoppers only find out the contents of after purchasing them.

The bargain trade outlet has becoming increasingly popular in recent weeks, thanks in part to the social media app TikTok, where a number of influencers have uploaded videos of themselves shopping at the store. Trade Outlet sell a huge range of overstock, customer returns and clearance goods in a treasure trove of bargains.

Inside the store, many of the items are boxed up and difficult to decipher the contents of, unless shoppers use the Amazon app to scan barcodes and find out what's inside. But for anyone who isn't willing to put in the time to rifle through the shelves, there's a lucky dip option stationed near the tills.

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Before customers pay for their items, they have the chance to pick random parcels out of the 'mystery' pile, with no idea what they are purchasing. We visited the warehouse on Thursday, January 23 to pick up some of the parcels for ourselves and see what we ended up with.

The shop usually has 'mystery boxes' in stock, which include a number of mystery items all bundled together for a collective price. But the staff said the store has been inundated with customers after finding recent social media fame, and as a result these boxes have completely sold out.

They still had large mystery parcels, priced at £3.50 each, all piled up inside a giant mail delivery sack near the tills. The parcels were all packaged up in the same A4-sized brown Amazon envelopes, but after rifling through the bag it was clear to see that all the contents were vastly different.

Some envelopes were soft and squidgy, while others contained heavy objects that filled out the entire package. Picking up the items to select a parcel, it was easy to work out what was inside some of the packages - for example books and DVDs were relatively simple to identify, even within the brown packaging.

Speaking to a member of staff about how to pick out a winning package, they said that bigger isn't always better. They explained that they recently chose a lucky dip item which looked substantial and weighty but turned out to be a pack of photocopier paper.

With this in mind, I picked out one package that seemed to contain a small, hard item, and then another package with squishy contents that took up around half of the envelope. I paid £7 for both parcels, and felt excited at the prospect of having purchased some sort of secret treasure.

My excitement was so great that I couldn't even wait until I got home to open the parcels, and ended up tearing into them in the car park outside Trade Outlet. As you can see from the video at the top of this story, my face says it all.

The first package contained a Yale 3 Star Cylinder lock, which I have to admit I was incredibly disappointed with. While I appreciate it's a useful item, it's completely and utterly useless to me. The extent of my DIY capabilities involves putting together flatpack furniture, and I don't have any immediate lock-related needs, so it will end up getting chucked in the toolbox under our sink and forgotten about.

However, looking online, it seems the lock is worth around £56 when ordered new online from Tool Station, so I suppose any resellers visiting the store could make a decent profit for their £3.50 mystery parcel spend.

Feeling underwhelmed at my first purchase, I pressed on with opening my second package and it was at this point I started to feel like I'd made a bit of a mug of myself. Inside the squidgy parcel was a birthday celebration kit including a banner, a foil balloon which I had no way of inflating, some colourful party balloons and little cake toppers.

While it wasn't completely useless to me, it wasn't the exciting reveal I had hoped for and I couldn't help but feel like I'd wasted £7 on rubbish. The thrill of a lucky dip can be hard to resist, but this time I found myself feeling disappointed with my bounty. If you're a talented reseller with a successful side hustle on the online marketplace then this could be a winner - but it certainly wasn't for me.