Some automobile dealers work hard on their Web sites, keeping them up to date and promptly answering customer inquiries about the cars. Often, however, neither dealers nor customers come away satisfied.

What dealers really want from a Web site is qualified customers who really want to buy a car. Instead, they frequently get numerous unfiltered e-mail queries that take a lot of time and effort to answer with few resulting sales. Customers, on the other hand, want information and service, but instead get a call from a commissioned salesperson - or no answer at all.

CarLotCanada.com, an online car search service based in Toronto, tries to make both sides happy. As a service for dealers, it lists new and used vehicles for sale and refers qualified customers in their area who want to buy. For customers, it answers questions, collects comparative information, puts forward financing options, checks on vehicle availability and obtains quotes.

"Car dealers are just not geared to be Internet companies," says Langley Van Der Kley, CarLotCanada's general manager. And who can blame them? he asks. "They're some of the greatest innovators and entrepreneurs in Canada, but it's hard to justify the energy they need to put into a Web site to make it work. The competition they face every day is down the street and in the newspapers."

While this is true for individual dealers, however, one site that serves many dealers makes more sense because of the economies of scale. CarLotCanada at www.carlotcanada.com lists cars from a growing roster of US, Japanese, European and Korean auto dealers in the Toronto area. Each dealer e-mails photos and specifications to CarLotCanada, which posts weekly updates. Dealers pay a participation fee plus a commission on sales.

Launched in August, the site gets about 2,500 "hits" or visits a week, which translates into between five and ten solid leads. "By the time we got going this year, we were past the peak lease return season in the fall," says Mr. Van Der Kley, "so we expect to really ramp up for next year in March."

Besides its own site, CarLotCanada also manages www.usedcarsincanada.com, a used-cars-only site. Designed on the same premise as CarLotCanada, it also draws from a variety of area dealerships and records about 5,000 hits a week.

When an online customer requests a quote on either site, a CarLotCanada service representative calls back and checks basic information such as when the car is needed, if the customer has test driven a similar vehicle, other types of cars that may be of interest and whether the customer has arranged financing.

"Once they're satisfied that a particular car is what they want, we find it for them and give them a price," says Mr. Van Der Kley. "They deal directly with the dealership from there, but we follow up later to be sure that they've test driven the car and were called back by the dealership."

CarLotCanada's niche has been to take some of the work out of buying a car and, in the process, make peace in the sometimes uneasy relationship between dealers and car buyers. "We want to make sure the customer is taken care of," says Mr. Van Der Kley. "That's our goal. If our customers are not happy, they're not going to buy. And if our dealers aren't happy, they won't be with us for long."