Hey, Mike!
Lizzy here, I’m a Shopify support Guru.
The redirects that Lisa has explained here work as a back end alternative to creating a URL redirect under Admin → Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirect. The steps for the latter are explained in this guide here.
How these redirects work is that if the URL leading to storename.com/returns was broken, you could use these steps to set up a redirect that sent storename.com/returns to storename.com/pages/returns, where the page is currently hosted. This is useful if you’re migrating to Shopify from another platform and need to use redirects to make sure any old links to your site still direct to the correct information. While you can set up redirects without “pages” in the path, you cannot alter the actual URL of the page to remove “pages.”
I hope this helps with what you’re looking to set up! Please feel free to let me know if you have any further questions about this.
Thank you,
Lizzy