For the most part, warehouses are commonly managed through the ERP and not the Admin Console in Optimizely <<product-name>>. However, the Admin Console does provide a wide variety of customizations and control. Warehouses allow you to manage the inventory of the products available on your website. A warehouse can either be a physical or a logical segregation of inventory. Using multiple warehouses allows for the identification of a default warehouse for products to come from, as well as the assignment of alternate warehouses that also carry the same product.

## Alternate warehouses

It can be advantageous for many reasons to use multiple warehouses to manage the inventory of products. For a physical example, a company has two warehouses: Warehouse One is the default warehouse, and Warehouse Two is the alternate. Because you know most of your customers are closer to Warehouse One and only a few are closer to Warehouse Two, you decide to keep 300 units of Product A in Warehouse One and 100 units of Product A in Warehouse Two. The website will show 400 total units of Product A, but to benefit your customers, you can assign the warehouse that is closer to a specific customer to keep shipping costs down. Another example using logical segregation would be to keep like products in like warehouses. If you are a construction supply company, it may make sense to keep lumber, electrical, roofing, and so on each in their own respective warehouses.

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Note

A warehouse cannot be assigned to itself as an alternate, thus the available warehouses list only displays warehouses that are not already assigned as alternates.