All SEO experts worldwide agree: clean urls got a positive effect in search engine rankings. If it is between you and your competitor, everything percentage counts.
You don’t want to spoil your urls with unnecessary slug, like ‘/product’ or ‘/product-category’. Google advices to use clean, indexable urls that describe the content of the page, without keyword stuffing or unnecessary parameters.
If you use WooCommerce, you always have /product and /product-category in your urls- but with this url cleaning plugin you can fix it right away!