E-commerce has become a very popular form of transacting business. A combination of factors such as high volume of transactions, high revenues, and increasing patronage of e-commerce activities have led to the hasty development and deployment of e-commerce systems by e-commerce service providers. The reliability of e-commerce systems has been queried in some recent scenarios. The approaches used in developing these applications are informal, ad hoc, and intuitive, which result in e-commerce systems that fail to meet both the users' and customers' expectations. The application of rigorous formal specification techniques in developing e-commerce systems would result in reliable applications processing that can guarantee the correctness of e-commerce transactions.;This thesis pragmatically evaluates five major specification techniques (including two variants of one of the techniques) amenable to specifying e-commerce systems. In this research, I identify the requirements necessary for a specification technique to completely specify all the components of an e-commerce system, and classify these requirements. Thereafter, I examine existing specification techniques applicable to specifying e-commerce systems, and provide a taxonomy for these techniques. Furthermore, I use the five major specification techniques for evaluation to specify the ordering process in a typical business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce scenario. Lastly, an evaluation of the specification techniques was carried out using the evaluation criteria derived from the identified requirements and a fuzzy logic framework developed in this research.
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