At first we have been starting monetizing our site by placing some products through the Amazon API (brand related). That brought some earnings. Then we fully integrated an aStore into our site (http://www.color-swatches.com/shop.html). Almost been a week without any conversions. Some advice is very welcome.
My advice would be not to user an aStore - they don't rank in Google and they don't convert well. I would look at linking to specific products from within your main site using good content and reviews. Group relevant products together to help your visitors. You could also look at building a proper amazon store. They key is promoting products that are relevant to your visitors - try and put yourself in your visitors shoes and figure out what they would want to buy and click on
The best way to drive traffic to your aStore is through internal linking. Use your blog to mention an item which is available in your Store and link to it. This way you have good conversions since the person who comes to you Store has read something relevant and seen the product name and then clicked through.
Amazon astore does not let you search the entire store from the search box. You can only search the category you have picked. That is not the case at Amazon.com. From their home page, you can search the entire site for a specific product. Wonder why this limitation for Astores? Is there a work around??
When it comes to conversion, the pre-sale content will give you better result than just astore. Posting product reviews, product tips, education to the products will pre-sale the product and make it's much easier to sell.
I've been having some of the same problems bro, I think I need to rethink my strategy when it comes to amazon.
I recommend you driving traffic directly to Amazon.com and let them do the sale. aStore doesn't provide the visitors all the nice interface they get on Amazon.com. The best is to concentrate your efforts getting the users on Amazon site rather, but beware don't use any black-hat techniques like redirects when the user doesn't expect to get redirected. It might be against Amazon TOS.