Dodo Payments: How Merchant Insights Drive Innovation
Deep
Product
Jul 16, 2025
|
3
min
I’m Deep, leading Product at Dodo Payments, a global payments platform that’s reshaping online transactions.
Every day, I partner with our stellar designers, engineers, and customer-success experts to deliver a seamless experience for merchants around the world. In this post, I’ll share how we harness merchant feedback to spark new features and enhancements on Dodo Payments.
Why Merchant Feedback Is Important
As product leaders, it’s easy to assume we know exactly what merchants need. However, maintaining an open dialogue with our users reveals invaluable insights you simply can’t glean from data alone. Thanks to our beta-phase merchants, we enjoy direct connections that encourage candid feedback and that feedback drives our entire roadmap for the coming quarter. All that remains is deciding which requests to action first.
Multiple Channels, One Objective: Listening Closely
Direct Calls
In our early days, the simplest solution was often the best: when a merchant hit a snag or sought an improvement, we’d pick up the phone. These conversations dig into the “why” behind a request, offering clarity that a one-line ticket never could.
Discord Community
Today, our 450-member Discord server serves as the vibrant hub for feedback, troubleshooting, and feature pitches. It’s the place where Merchant-of-Record clients congregate, share challenges, and vote on ideas.
In-Dashboard Feature Requests
We’ve built a dedicated “Feature Request” panel right into our dashboard. Merchants can submit new ideas or up-vote existing submissions, creating a transparent, crowd-driven priority list.
Chat & Email Support
Not everyone is comfortable with Discord, so we complement it with a chatbot on our dashboard and a traditional support email channel. Whether it’s payment-processing hiccups or compliance questions, merchants can reach us however they prefer.
One-on-One Interviews
Scaling makes personal outreach tougher, but our business team remains committed to speaking with as many merchants as possible. These in-depth discussions uncover nuances that surveys and tickets often miss.
Prioritizing with Purpose
We welcome every piece of merchant input, but we can’t act on everything simultaneously. That’s where prioritization frameworks come into play.
We rely on the RICE model (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) to gauge the ROI of each feature request. By scoring potential updates, we ensure our roadmap focuses on initiatives that move the needle most effectively. Of course, in the early stages, we sometimes fast-track critical fixes that directly impact a merchant’s business even if it means bumping planned work.
Example: Our License Keys feature was slated for an upcoming sprint. After speaking with several merchants who urgently needed it to run their businesses, we reprioritized and rolled it out in just one week.
The result? Merchants applauded our responsiveness and we showcased our ability to adapt quickly.
Turning Feedback into Action
Recurring pain points become the catalysts for scalable solutions. Whenever we spot a pattern, we build a feature to resolve it for all merchants at once.
Policy Generator: During KYC verification, many technical founders lacked ready-made privacy policies, terms & conditions, and refund policies. We responded by launching a free policy-generator tool. Adoption skyrocketed, and we’ve seen countless merchants use our templates, confirmation that we’re delivering real value.
Onboarding Tutorial: New users sometimes struggled to navigate our dashboard and create their first product. We addressed this by embedding an interactive walkthrough that guides merchants through product creation and their first test transaction. Early data show significant reductions in onboarding friction.
Final Thoughts
At Dodo Payments, agility is in our DNA. There’s nothing quite like announcing a Friday changelog packed with features our merchants have been eagerly awaiting. Those moments, when feedback becomes functionality are why we do what we do.
So keep the insights coming. We’re listening, and we’re committed to turning your feedback into innovations that power your success.
