Clicks And Bricks

Think of every Baby Tap-A-Tune piano or Makeup Pretty Angelica picked by the yellow-capped pickers, packed by the blue-hatted packers and loaded by the gray-brimmed loaders at this 100,000-sq.-ft. eToys warehouse in Commerce, Calif., as another round fired in the retail-vs.-e-tail battle. Christmas is always war in the toy industry, and nowhere more so this year than online, where pure e-tailers like eToys are for the first time fighting on several fronts.

Attacking from the Internet is Amazon.com the Web superstore that began selling toys this summer and plans to do to eToys what it did to CDnow in the online...