About LotRanger
It started in print, in 1989.
It grew out of decades of working directly with dealerships, vehicle advertising, inventory data, photos, websites, and the day-to-day pressure of keeping automotive information organized, accurate, and useful.
Our roots go back to 1989, when Electric Ink began as an advertising agency. Over time, that work led us deeply into the automotive world through dealer advertising, publishing, and inventory management. We published Wheels, a weekly automotive newspaper serving dealers across east-central Ontario, with most of the advertising coming from used-car and new-car dealerships.
Built because the work demanded it.
At its peak, that workflow meant managing thousands of vehicles every week — often in the range of 4,000 to 5,000 vehicles — along with photos, descriptions, sold units, incoming inventory, dealer updates, print deadlines, and eventually online listings.
In the late 1990s, around 1997–1998, we began building our own internal online tools to track incoming inventory, sold inventory, photos, and vehicle copy. Those tools were not built because software was trendy. They were built because the work demanded it. There was too much information moving too quickly to manage it properly by paper, phone calls, spreadsheets, and memory alone.
The magazine closed. The software kept evolving.
That early system evolved into WheelsOnline.ca, which became an online extension of the magazine and dealership inventory workflow. WheelsOnline continued as a magazine and online automotive presence until 2020, when COVID brought that chapter to a close.
But the software kept evolving.
The same problems we were solving for ourselves — tracking inventory, organizing photos, managing vehicle details, keeping dealer information accurate, and helping dealerships present their vehicles properly — became the foundation for what would eventually become LotRanger.