In Odoo, a Warehouse is the actual building/place in which your items are stocked. You can setup multiple warehouses and create moves between warehouses.
A Location, is a specific space within your warehouse. It can be considered as a sublocation of your warehouse, as a shelf, a floor, an aisle, etc. Therefore, a location is part of one warehouse only and it is not possible to link one location to multiple warehouses. You can configure as much locations as you need under one warehouse.
There are 3 types of locations:
- The Physical Locations are internal locations that are part of the warehouses for which you are the owner. They can be the loading and unloading area of your warehouse, a shelf or a department, etc.
- The Partner Locations are spaces within a customer and/or vendor's warehouse. They work the same way as Physical Locations with the only difference being that you are not the owner of the warehouse.
- The Virtual Locations are places that do not exist, but in which products can be placed when they are not physically in an inventory yet (or anymore). They come in handy when you want to place lost products out of your stock (in the Inventory loss), or when you want to take into account products that are on their way to your warehouse (Procurements).
In Odoo, locations are structured hierarchically. You can structure your locations as a tree, dependent on a parent-child relationship. This gives you more detailed levels of analysis of your stock operations and the organization of your warehouses.