I usually average at about 6% conversion rate on my power ID..On my theme site, its closer to about 10% give or take..I'd really like to see the quotas lowered a tad for a ref rate though, it seems the more we sell, the harder it is to get a higher commission....
I'm around 8% of Amazon clicks converting into sales. That's not bad IMHO. I'm not specifically targeting $3 items, but sometimes I do get the pointless commission sale. I have a new lower-traffic theme site and that has very high conversion rates, but the traffic is very low. It's give and take.
I'm getting 50-60% on one of my keywords. I posted some figures here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=4314597&postcount=81 I've only recently started, but I want to build up a bigger list of really profitable keywords and track testing different bids to see which gives the highest ROI (higher bid = more clicks, but less profit per sale - so there must be a sweet spot where I get the maximum profit while maintaining a nice number of clicks). I'll be posting all this info on my blog as I go (as mentioned in that post I've just linked), which you can find at http://blog.dantup.me.uk/
2.8% is not low at all. Unless you have amazingly targeted traffic from people who are ready to buy this instance, no way are your conversions gonna be like 25%.
I'm getting over 50% on one set of keywords I'm bidding on, bit there are so few searches, it's not making much money. I'm getting 5-6 clicks/day average, with around 3/day buying. It's a bit of a fluke though, since none of my others are even 5% conversion There's no reason you can't have a higher conversion rate, you just have to write your ads well. Include prices, shipping costs and lead times in your ads to stop people clicking to find out more information. Include enough info that the readers have little reason to click other than to buy. I posted some of the ideas I've been following on my blog: http://blog.dantup.me.uk/2007/08/making-money-without-website-with.html RSS feed is here: http://feeds.dantup.me.uk/DanTup