A trading post, trading station, or trading house, also known as a factory in European and colonial contexts, is an establishment or settlement where goods and services could be traded.

Typically a trading post allows people from one geographic area to exchange for goods produced in another area. Usually money is not used. The barter that occurs often includes an aspect of haggling. In some examples, local inhabitants can use a trading post to exchange what they have (such as locally-harvested furs) for goods they wish to acquire (such as manufactured trade goods imported from industrialized places).

Given bulk transportation costs, exchanges made at a trading post for long-distance distribution can involve items which either party or both parties regard as luxury goods.

A trading post can consist either of a single building or of an entire town. Trading posts have been established in a range of areas, including relatively remote ones, but most often near an ocean, a river, or another source of a natural resource. A prominent geographical location and the head start provided by an early trading post ensured that trading posts feature in the history of many of today's cities, such as Timbuktu and Hong Kong.

Various emporia — especially Greek or Phoenician — in classical antiquity.

Major towns in the Hanseatic League, known as kontors, a form of trading posts.

Charax Spasinu, a trading post between the Roman and Parthian Empires.

Multiple Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, French and English trading-posts ("factories") in the Indian Ocean, from east Africa to the East Indies, but especially on the coasts of India, established from very early in the 16th century onwards.