By Sierra Kotwicki | Product Marketer at Payabli
What a product marketer sees when a platform treats payments like a checkbox.
I market products for a living. When I joined Payabli as its first dedicated product marketer, my whole job became understanding who payments is for, what job it does for them, and how to say it so the right people actually care.
Which means I notice when something that should get that treatment doesn’t. In vertical SaaS, that something is almost always payments.
Most platforms don’t market payments. They just switch it on. It shows up as a toggle in account settings, a line on the pricing page, a “yes, we do that” in an RFP – and then everyone moves on. The work that any other product would get – figuring out who it’s for, what it does for them, how to launch it, how to prove it – never happens.
Here’s the distinction I keep coming back to. A feature is something you switch on. A product is something you do the work to understand, position, launch, and prove. And the product go-to-market work is the part I see most vertical SaaS platforms skip, because payments technically function the moment it’s enabled. It processes. A transaction goes through. It looks done. So nobody does the marketing – and then everyone wonders why merchants aren’t adopting.
Let me walk through the work that gets skipped. It’s all product marketing, and none of it is glamorous.
“Merchants” is not an audience
Once payments go live, most vertical SaaS platforms promote payments as a feature with a general announcement: “Payments are now available!” – sent to their entire merchant portfolio, identical copy, one and done.
But your merchants aren’t one audience. A solo practitioner who runs their whole business from their phone has nothing in common with a multi-location operator with a back-office team, except that they both pay you. They have different fears about payments, different reasons to adopt, different things that make them hesitate. A product marketer’s first move is to segment – to figure out which merchants have the most to gain and what specifically would move them – and then convey the different value propositions to each.
One generic blast isn’t a launch. It’s a notification. And notifications don’t change behavior.
Nobody wakes up wanting payments
This is the one I’d tattoo on every platform team if I could.
Merchants do not want payments. They want to get paid without chasing an invoice for three weeks. They want to stop reconciling two systems by hand every week. They want to stop losing a sale because the only option was “mail us a check.” Those are the things they want. Payments is just the mechanism.
Feature-thinking markets the mechanism: “We support ACH, cards, and digital wallets.” So what? Good product marketing markets the job that gets done: “Get paid the day you finish the work, not the month after.” Same capability – but one is a spec sheet and the other is a reason to care. The discipline here is brutally simple and almost nobody does it: take every payments feature you’ve got and run it through the “so what?” test until you reach something a merchant would actually feel.
Switching it on isn’t a launch
In a feature mindset, the moment the code ships, the job is done. In a product mindset, that moment is the starting line.
Adoption is its own motion, and a lot of it is product marketing: the in-product nudge at the moment a merchant would feel the pain, the activation sequence that walks them from “enabled” to “first transaction,” the milestone messaging when they hit their tenth payout. A product gets an adoption plan. A feature gets a changelog entry and a shrug.
And here’s the part feature-thinkers never get to: once you’re marketing adoption, you can actually measure which message works. Which value prop drives activation? Which segment converts? That’s message-market fit, and you only get to learn it if you treat the launch as something to market in the first place.
Your own team is your first market
Before a single merchant hears about payments, your own people have to be able to talk about it. Your CSMs, your support team, your account managers – if they can’t explain in one sentence why a merchant should turn payments on, no merchant ever will.
Payments adoption dies internally first. This is why internal enablement is product marketing, not an afterthought to it. Someone has to arm the people closest to the merchant. Otherwise the best positioning in the world never leaves the building.
Claims don’t travel without proof
The last thing a feature never gets, and a product always needs: proof. A platform will say “merchants love our payments” with nothing behind it. A product marketer’s instinct is to ask how do we know, and can we show it. Proof is what makes a claim portable. Without it, your messaging is just an assertion competing with everyone else’s assertions.
For what it’s worth, the proof we lean on at Payabli is scale: hundreds of billions of dollars moving across more than 100 vertical platforms. But the number only matters because we can point to what it did for the platforms behind it. A statistic with no story is just a feature in disguise.
The takeaway
Treating payments as a product isn’t about charging more for it. It’s about doing the work – knowing who it’s for, naming the job it does, marketing the launch instead of just shipping it, beating the status quo, arming your own team, and bringing proof.
That work is product marketing. It’s unglamorous, it’s mostly invisible when it’s done well, and it is the entire difference between payments that sit in a settings menu and payments your merchants actually adopt.
If you’re reading this thinking “we switched payments on a year ago and never really marketed it” – that’s not a problem, that’s the opportunity. Let’s have a conversation.