It's possible to make it SEO friendly if you know how, and that'll work like any other store - product pages getting indexed on search engines, driving organic search traffic, and getting sales on autopilot.
The key is unique content and offering value to the visitors. Anyone can create an aStore but not everyone can create good, compelling content.
I know this is a very very old thread, but google got me here, so I think my comment worth for others seaching the google. I have an amazon aStore, and it works like a charm, I spent one adwords voucher of $100, and got like 20 sales. so if you get traffic to it it will work. period!
I am using facebook page to promote my amazon store. With facebook page you can drive more traffic from your friends that already join on your facebook page. This is what i am doing last week and i made sales from that even not much. facebook.com/topchristmasgifttoys
It's not that selling on Amazon with aStores is not profitable, its more about how you promote and stick with it, learn all you can and make it profitable. After all, Amazon in itself is quite profitable. Hang in there and work it.
You should try adding links to your store from an existing or newly created website with similar content. Then create post about the products and link to your astore to create natural backlinking. aStores are easy to maintain and will probably take a few of them to make any decent cash. But if they are your only focus then you should be able to make cash with them with out having to work on them much.
I have been doing almost ten astore + blog, but there weren't any sign ! Any suggestion is welcome. Free tools is fine.
I Build Amazon Review sites for a living, and I've built a few AStores as well. The A Stores results are terrible. I don't recommend them.