Short answer
Maya is a Philippine digital payments brand covering a consumer wallet and a merchant acceptance business, alongside a Bangko Sentral-licensed digital bank under the same name. For an online store Maya appears as a checkout option comparable to GCash, accepted through a payment gateway or through Maya’s own merchant tools and QR Ph acceptance.
Also called: PayMaya, Maya Business
Adding Maya alongside GCash is usually cheap when a gateway already supports both, and worth doing. Wallet loyalty in the Philippines is not universal, and a shopper who keeps a balance in one wallet will not always top up another to complete a purchase. The cost of the second option is a line in a configuration file; the cost of omitting it is an abandoned basket you never see.
One practical wrinkle is naming. The consumer product and merchant business were previously branded PayMaya, and older plugins, documentation and API references still use that name. When evaluating an integration, check what it was built against and when it was last updated rather than assuming a package labelled PayMaya is either current or defunct.
Where this comes up in our work
Related terms
GCash
GCash is a Philippine mobile wallet operated by G-Xchange, Inc.
Payment Gateway
A payment gateway is the service that carries a customer’s payment details from a checkout to the institutions that authorise and settle the money — card networks, banks, e-wallets.
Xendit
Xendit is a Southeast Asian payment infrastructure provider operating in the Philippines and neighbouring markets, offering one API for cards, e-wallets, bank transfers, virtual accounts, over-the-counter payments and outbound disbursements.
PayMongo
PayMongo is a Philippine payment gateway built around a developer API and hosted checkout, aggregating cards, wallets including GCash, Maya and GrabPay, online banking and over-the-counter payments behind one integration.
Reading definitions because you are scoping a project? Skip ahead and just ask.