This paper describes e-commerce and some of its requirements and how it can gain from using formal methods approach in the development of applications in the development of applications in the domain. We illustrate our ideas with a prototype and model the components of our prototype system using the Unified Modeling Language(UML). This paper also examines the issues of correctness and reliability of satisfying a user’s order by accessing data (in possibly heterogeneous databases and platforms) distributed across the enterprise of the Internet, and describes techniques for guaranteeing and enhancing a high degree of system dependability. Our model relies on an event-based and causally aware framework for specifying e-commerce transaction protocols.