Warehousing is the process of storing goods to be sold or distributed. When you are starting an e-commerce business, you might use a spare room, garage, or temporary storage as your warehousing. However, with scale, businesses usually use warehouses to safely and securely store products in a more complex and organized manner to track the location, timing, and number of items being stored. Warehouses are buildings or locations specifically built to function as a warehouse facility with a proper warehouse management system.
Warehousing is the process of storing physical goods before they are sold or further distributed. Warehouses safely and securely store products in an organized way to track where items are located, when they arrived, how long they have been there, and the quantity on hand. There are many types of warehousing, which we’ll touch on later.
Sort of. Warehousing is one of the functions of a third-party logistics partner. Third-party logistics (3PL) is the outsourcing of logistics to a provider. A 3PL will handle order fulfillment services for you, which includes warehousing products to fulfill those orders.
These are often used interchangeably. Warehousing is more focused on the storage function, which a distribution center also does. However, the distribution center also performs order fulfillment on top of storing products. To put it simply, not all warehouses are distribution centers, but all distribution centers are warehouses.
There are many kinds of warehouses. Some of those are: