In iPaaS.com, a Location is a place where inventory lives - a retail store, a warehouse, or a virtual location such as a dropship pool. Locations are the anchor of the inventory layer, and getting them right is what keeps stock quantities syncing to the correct place.

Every inventory record points at a Location, so a Location must exist before stock can sync against it. Because different systems model "where stock is" differently - a 3PL's warehouses, a retailer's stores, a storefront's single implicit pool - iPaaS.com represents each of them as a Location so inventory flows have a consistent anchor to key against.

Locations can nest. A location can have a parent location, letting you represent a network at whatever level of detail each connected system needs. When you're building a hierarchy, the parent location should exist before its children.

A Location Group is a named rollup of Locations - for example "East Region" - used to pool availability. The group itself holds no inventory; it aggregates the stock of the locations inside it. The classic use is presenting one sellable number to a sales channel from stock that's tracked across several underlying locations, without custom rollup logic. The link is two-way: a Location lists the groups it belongs to, and a group lists its locations. Locations must exist before they can be added to a group.

A Location carries a single address (not a collection of addresses). The location's phone number lives on that address record rather than on the location header.

Locations can also carry relationships to other locations - a typed link with an optional date range and a primary flag. Whether relationships are used depends on the integration; not every connector implements them.