'I went Amazon shopping at Trade Outlet and was stopped in my tracks at the till'

When it comes to shopping I'm a very awkward customer in that I love a bargain but I absolutely despise sale shopping. I get very easily overwhelmed by the chaos of a sales rack, and I absolutely do not have the patience to spend hours rifling through piles of rubbish just to find one bargain treasure.

With this in mind, perhaps it was a foregone conclusion that a warehouse filled with clearance goods would not be for me - but I still tried to go in with an open mind. I've been seeing videos of Trade Outlet all over my TikTok For You page recently, and some of the shoppers posting to the social media app seem to have found some absolute bargains.

I visited the Brunswick Business Park site on a Thursday afternoon, thinking it would be quiet and hopefully a slightly more relaxed shopping experience. But when I arrived the car park was already full, with cars plonked in make-shift spaces and a steady stream of shoppers filing out of the warehouse pushing overflowing trolleys of goods.

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While I felt slightly trepidatious at the sight of the car park, I thought the teeming trolleys were a clear indication that I was about to find some serious bargains. Trade Outlet is a chain, with Merseyside locations in Liverpool and Wirral, as well as a Cheshire site in Ellesmere Port.

It sells a huge range of overstock, customer returns and clearance goods to eBay traders, car boot sellers and Facebook Marketplace aficionados. I'm no stranger to a side hustle so I had high hopes for Trade Outlet - but within seconds of stepping through the front door I realised I'd walked into my own personal version of hell.

The warehouse is like the final boss level of sale shopping. It's chaos. There is some effort made to group similar items together in different areas of the warehouse, with sections dedicated to kids' toys, clothing, homeware and books - but beyond these vague categories, it's every man for himself.

Lots of the items are a complete mystery, with the boxes giving no clue whatsoever as to what's inside. Shoppers who have the Amazon app are able to scan codes on these boxes to find out what the contents are, and to get some indication of what the retail price may be - but opening any of the packages without paying for them is strictly forbidden.

Despite signs clearly stating that shoppers must not open any of the boxes, this warning had been largely ignored and some of my fellow customers had gone to town opening different packages and leaving things strewn on the shelves. In one section, a collection of random shoes had been opened and left out, with a nearby clothing rail failing to attract the attention of many shoppers.

If you were on the hunt for pet items or kids' toys then Trade Outlet could be the place to pick up a bargain - there were entire sections filled with building blocks, space toys, puzzles and other fun items which would be great for birthdays or Christmas time. And there was also a wide selection of pet items, including harnesses, cooling beds and bowls - if you were willing to rifle through the piles to find your chosen item.

The prices were genuinely very reasonable - I picked up a set of dummies that were originally priced at £13 but reduced to £2 in store. It was a huge saving and much cheaper than I'd be able to find elsewhere - but it was the only item I purchased because it was lying alone on a shelf close to the exit and didn't involve any work to pick out.

I appreciate that I am the problem here, and not Trade Outlet. I'm too lazy, too impatient and too picky to spend any time looking through shelf after shelf of items in order to find the odd star buy. If you've got the time to dedicate to shopping here, or a more discerning eye for a bargain than me, then you'd be able to find absolutely loads of great things and save lots of money. But it just wasn't for me.

Heading to the till with my solo purchase, I decided to try and make my trip to the warehouse feel more worthwhile by picking up two 'mystery packages' at checkout. 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.

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.