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The best tech is built in conversation with users. When users speak about their needs from products they rely on, great tech responds with seamless integrations that make the conversation of ideas flow. At Cashfree Payments, our merchants are a crucial part of our tech conversation.
Some of our most impactful ideas and features start from our merchants telling us what could make their experience better. Here is how our teams rally behind merchant needs to ensure fast feature rollouts and building a permanent bridge for merchant voices inside our platform.
From merchant voices to real features
When a merchant flagged a friction point around subscription visibility, Rishab F Tated, SDE 3, and the team wasted no time acting on it. The ask was simple: the merchant couldn’t see when a subscription had transitioned into a ‘customer cancelled’ state on the Cashfree dashboard. “This missing visibility was creating friction in their operations,” shares Rishab.
The team sensed that this feedback was the need of the hour for the merchant, especially because it directly impacted their ability to serve their customers better. They shipped the feature within hours. “We received the request in the morning and shipped the enhancement by evening. That turnaround reflects how nimble we are when the problem is clear and the impact is immediate,” he says.
The feature was also engineered for future scalability. “We structured it in a way that can support additional subscription lifecycle insights in the future. It was designed with clean data tracking and UI considerations in mind, which makes it easier to plug into upcoming analytics and monitoring enhancements around subscription health. Real-world feedback brings a lot of empathy into how we build and helps us avoid overengineering while still keeping things extensible,” Rishab adds.
Notifications that move at merchant speed
When another merchant requested real-time payment alerts, Shimil Jas, Mobile Engineer 3, helped turn the idea into reality within days. The merchant requested for a notification on payments made. “For smaller merchants, we felt that getting real-time payment alerts could be a useful feature,” says Shimil. The mobile and notification teams came together fast, and today, merchants can enable payment notifications via the Cashfree Merchant App, receiving instant updates on payment success and failures.
But the build wasn’t just reactive, it was also strategic. Shimil explains, “This implementation taught us that scaling effectively requires staying close to merchant needs. We started with the core ask, real-time alerts, then built a framework to support future use cases like night-time mutes, low balance alerts, and risk-based notifications.”
The team struck a balance between immediate value and scalable design. “We learned that listening to merchants directly leads to better prioritisation. The notification system’s architecture now supports multiple transaction types because we understood from merchant feedback that payment status was just their first priority, but not their only need.”
Scaling Merchant Feedback: The Feature Request Button
These rapid-fire implementations inspired something more permanent: a frictionless, always-on feedback loop directly inside the Cashfree platform.
Devendra Saroj, Frontend Engineer 2, led the development of the Feature Request button – a visible, intuitive way for merchants to suggest features they want within Cashfree Payments. The button sits on the merchant dashboard for easy access.
“Simplicity and visibility were top priorities,” explains Devendra. “We wanted it to be intuitive for merchants to submit a request without friction, and equally easy to discover what others are asking for. This meant focusing on clear UX, quick submission flows, and ensuring engagement tools like voting and commenting were seamless.”
The button is also built to encourage discovery. “When a merchant starts typing a request, similar suggestions auto-appear. This helps reduce duplicates and makes the feature feel smarter and more connected, while also encouraging merchants to engage with existing suggestions,” shares Devendra.
“The most exciting part was giving merchants a direct voice in shaping the product”, says Devendra.
Building with Empathy, Shipping with Speed
At Cashfree Payments, engineering isn’t just about building fast. It’s about building right. Across teams and roles, what sets our product culture apart is a shared commitment to solving for real merchant needs with urgency and scale.
For Rishabh, the impact is deeply personal: “We’re not just writing code, we’re enabling businesses, solving payment pain points, and making real lives easier with each feature we ship,” he says. He also credits the collaborative spirit that fuels these moments: “A special shout-out to Sushane Yadav and Ankit Ekka from our team—their quick collaboration helped us test and deploy the update by the end of the day.”
For Shimil, this project was a classic example of how engineering works at Cashfree, “We don’t just build features in isolation; we understand how each capability directly affects a business’s operations and bottom line. When a merchant receives a payment notification, that’s not just a technical achievement, it’s giving them real-time awareness of their cash flow, which might mean the difference between making decisions with confidence or uncertainty.”
For Devendra, working on the Feature Request button was about empowerment, “Everyone, from individual contributors to our manager and CTO, was hands-on in refining the idea, aligning on the problem, and delivering a thoughtful solution. It reflects our bias toward action and our belief in building with empathy.”
At Cashfree, we don’t just collect feedback. We act on it. We scale it. We engineer around it.
Because the best products aren’t imagined in isolation, they’re built in conversation.
And our conversation with merchants is only getting started.
To join our high impact teams, explore open roles here:
