As the commerce environment becomes more competitive, companies are compelled to adopt a collaborative commerce (c-commerce) paradigm to sustain a competitive edge over the Internet. C-commerce demands a variety of collaborative interactions among multiple stakeholders. In order to develop c-commerce systems, this paper proposes a role-driven component-oriented methodology (RCOM), which consists of four phases: collaboration analysis, component analysis, component design, and implementation. The roles can help implement well-defined business functions, while the components enable the production of reusable artifacts in a systematic fashion. Accordingly, RCOM is likely to help improve the system development process. To demonstrate the practical usefulness of this methodology, a real-life case is illustrated. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.