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PSP Pharma Mobile App Optimization: Up to 85% Faster Checkout Entry
API stability, image and rendering optimization, and checkout performance engineering for a high-traffic pharmacy retail mobile app
Project Summary
PSP Pharma’s mobile app needed performance and reliability improvements across its core shopping flows, with checkout being the most friction-prone. Slow transitions, network instability, image-loading overhead, rendering bottlenecks, and memory-management issues affected the experience across product, cart, checkout, and category screens.
Elogic Commerce rewrote the app’s architecture to remove a middleware layer that had previously sat between the app and Magento, enabling the app to communicate with Magento directly, then optimized the app’s API and network handling, rendering and image performance, memory management, and checkout flow. The work reduced Go to Checkout time by up to 85%, reduced Select Locker time by up to 86%, and improved all nine measured checkout operations in the optimized build. Homepage Full Load time also decreased by 54%.
Key Outcomes
Up to 85%
lower Go to Checkout time, from 20s to 3–4s
Up to 86%
failure rate at 6,000 VUs, with zero HTTP 5xx errors across 4.16M requests
9/9
measured checkout operations improved, with no freezes observed during performance testing
54%
lower Homepage Full Load time, from 7.67s to 3.67s
About the Client
PSP Pharma operates a mobile shopping app alongside its Magento-based ecommerce platform, serving customers in the pharmacy and healthcare retail sector.
The app supported core shopping journeys across product discovery, cart, checkout, and delivery or pickup selection. As performance issues emerged across these flows, the priority was to improve responsiveness and reliability without treating checkout as an isolated screen.
Project Complexity
A middleware layer between the app and Magento had contributed to the app’s performance and stability issues, requiring an architecture rework to support direct communication.
Checkout directly connects app performance with purchase completion, so transitions into checkout, delivery/pickup switching, and locker selection needed targeted measurement rather than broad application-level tuning.
Changing network conditions made error handling, retry logic, and timeout management important to reliable interactions.
Issues spanned API calls, image loading, list rendering, memory management, and screen-level interactions, so optimizing a single layer wouldn’t address the full experience.
The engagement required benchmarking individual checkout operations rather than a single aggregate performance metric, to identify and verify specific fixes.
Business Challenge
Checkout interactions were taking significantly longer than expected for a mobile shopping experience, with Go to Checkout and Select Locker as particularly slow points. A middleware layer between the app and Magento had contributed to performance and stability issues across the app, while network and API handling needed stronger error recovery, retry, and timeout management. Image loading, list rendering, and memory issues affected responsiveness across product, cart, checkout, and category screens, and the business needed measurable performance improvement across the complete checkout flow rather than isolated optimization of individual screens.
Elogic Commerce's Solution
Architecture Rework and Direct Magento Integration
Elogic rewrote the app’s architecture to remove the middleware layer previously sitting between the app and Magento, enabling the app to communicate with Magento directly. This addressed a core source of the performance and stability issues affecting the app and formed the foundation for the optimization work that followed.
API and Network Stability
Elogic improved error handling, retry logic, network-error recovery, and request-timeout management across the app’s API layer. Network reliability was treated as a critical part of the performance work rather than a separate concern.
Image and Rendering Optimization
Elogic optimized image loading and implemented lazy loading across core shopping screens. List-rendering performance was also improved to reduce unnecessary rendering overhead and improve responsiveness.
Memory Management Optimization
Elogic addressed memory-management issues across product, cart, checkout, and category screens to improve stability during continued app usage.
Checkout Flow Performance Engineering
Elogic measured and optimized nine individual checkout operations, including Go to Checkout, Select Locker, Delivery/Pickup switching, cold-start cart opening, add-to-cart, and cart-counter loading.
Before-and-After Performance Validation
Each optimization was evaluated against the baseline so that improvements could be measured at the operation level rather than inferred from general application performance.
Results & Business Impact
Checkout Entry Time
Go to Checkout time was reduced by up to 85%, from 20 seconds to 3–4 seconds in the optimized build.
Locker Selection
Select Locker time was reduced by up to 86%, from 7 seconds to approximately 1 second.
Full Checkout Flow
All nine measured checkout operations improved in the optimized build versus baseline, with the optimized build recording the fastest measured result for each operation. Delivery/Pickup switching improved the most in absolute terms, by 1.9 seconds, while cold-start cart open, add-to-cart, and cart-counter loading also improved.
Homepage Performance
Homepage Interactive time was reduced by 44%, while Full Load time decreased by 54%, from 7.67 seconds to 3.67 seconds. No freezes were observed during performance testing of the optimized build.
Capabilities Demonstrated
01
Mobile app architecture rework and direct API integration
02
Mobile app performance engineering across iOS and Android
03
API and network resilience engineering
04
Error handling, retry, recovery, and timeout optimization
05
Image optimization and lazy-loading implementation
06
List-rendering performance optimization
07
Mobile memory-management optimization
08
Checkout flow performance engineering
09
Operation-level before-and-after performance benchmarking
When This Solution Is a Good Fit
This approach is well suited to mobile commerce apps where checkout or other core shopping flows have become measurable performance bottlenecks and where the business needs systematic, operation-by-operation optimization. It is particularly relevant when performance issues span multiple layers of the application, including API calls, network handling, rendering, image loading, memory management, and checkout interactions, or when a legacy middleware layer is limiting direct communication with the backend platform. It is generally not the right fit for apps without an active purchase flow or where performance issues have not been identified through measurable user-flow or technical benchmarks.
Planning to Optimize Your Mobile App's Checkout Performance?
If your mobile app's checkout flow, network reliability, or core screen performance is creating friction for customers, Elogic Commerce can establish the performance baseline, identify bottlenecks across the application stack, optimize the critical paths, and validate improvements operation by operation.