>>When you mention 'Paypal offers a secure website for your consumers to enter their CC data...', are you talking about when a user to directed to the Paypal site to enter cc data?
Yes
>>When you mention using Paypal's 'electronic payment gateway API...' are you referring to processes such as DoDirectPayment and DoExpressCheckoutPayment?
I could not locate DoDirectPayment on their web site, this might be some programming term when pushing the information over to Paypal's website. They offer their standard third party processing and depending on the country, you might not need to push the customer over to their secure website.
They do offer a (Website Payments Standard)
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_wp-standard-overview-outside in which the consumer might not need a Paypal account, depending on the country you are in. And they have Website Payments Pro Solution (
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_wp-pro-overview-outside) in which you can process the secure transaction on your site or direct users to Paypal's secure website. This give you a merchant account and an electronic payment gateway.
>>And in order for my to do that from my 'secure website' I would need to contact my host to see if they offer this service?
Yes - you need to contact your hosting company.
>> Are you aware of a particularly effective tutorial on e-commerce or would you point me to the Paypal documentation as well?
It depends on which method you are going to use. For example, if you were to use their Website Payments Standard service, start at
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_wp-standard-feature-list-outside and read through the pages. You can see the options for the back end integration (
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_wp-standard-feature-list-outside#backend) and see how to get a test store to learn how to send transaction through to Paypal's website
