Thanks Basara. But I'm not very adept at coding, so I'll explain what I see.
In AbanteCart Admin: System - Settings - System: Use SEO URL's is ON
In cPanel - File Manager - public_html: .htaccess has the following data in it when opened for editing (I don't have a file named htaccess.txt):
# To set your custom php.ini, add the following line to this file:
# suphp_configpath /home/yourusername/path/to/php.ini
# php_value mbstring.func_overload 4 # Required for PWSB support. Please do not uncomment this line.
The AbanteCart manual says this: "Use SEO URLs: To use SEO URL's Apache module mod-rewrite must be installed and you need to rename the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess"
I don't know how to check to see if I have "Apache module mod-rewrite" installed, or even how to install it. Am I in the correct file directory? Any and all help is very much appreciated.