Antonio,

It's been a while! Hope you are having a good summer.

That is a great question, and hopefully anybody else who reads this can learn from this as well :)

J2 URLs are handled in the same way as other Joomla menu links. Could the checkout and shopping cart technically run without a menu item? Yes - but you would have no control over the front-end URLs or customization in any way (ie, no core method to add a module to a page that doesn't have a menu item.)

With that said...

Depending on how you wish to set up your store, you should always have a menu item for the J2 category page (if using that) or the Joomla category page if using it as an article. You will have more control over the menu settings if using the J2 category (or tag) pages.

The Checkout and Shopping Cart pages should have menu items, as well as the My Profile page.

Where you place them is entirely up to you and will determine the final URL.

When I build my stores, I usually place all menu items in a hidden menu and only use an alias to point back to them - this way I can structure my links the way I want them to be without worrying how they will look in any menu structure. It also makes it easier to manage the store in the future, so you aren't jumping between 10 different menus trying to find the real menu item.

On this site, none of the menu items you see in any of the menus are the actual menu items themselves; rather, they are all menu aliases that point back to the one "holder of truth" (the hidden menu).

This is even more important when using page builders as they make it easy to design and display megamenus. Without having the menu items structured properly somewhere else, many sites find themselves with poor SEO and broken links since the "store" menu item wasn't included in the mega menu (and only the store's subcategory items were).

So... in short: 

Version 4.1 will actually have a checklist that will help create these menu links and disappear once you have them created - but in the meantime, you can place the menu items anywhere and call them whatever you wish. If you create a hidden menu and place the Checkout menu item in the hidden menu, because it is a top level menu item it would appear as https://website.com/checkout (if the menu alias for that item is checkout).

If you placed it as a sub-menu item under a products page menu item titled Shop (which I would not recommend) then the final URL would be https://website.com/shop/checkout

Hope this helps,

Adam

These settings can be set in the configuration area of J2 (Cart tab -> Empty cart redirect URL field).

Adam

My pleasure.