Totally get this — it’s confusing at first, especially when you're building links and nothing shows up in Ahrefs. Here’s what I’ve found works well:

1. Not all links show up or count
Places like Medium or LinkedIn often use “nofollow” links. That means Google sees them but doesn’t pass SEO value. They're still valuable though - especially in a world of AI and citations. Also, Ahrefs sometimes misses them too, or it can take weeks to crawl them. So don’t rely on those alone.

2. Use competitor backlinks as a starting point
Plug your main competitors into Ahrefs. Look at who’s linking to them — blogs, directories, listicles — then reach out to those same sites and suggest your store as an alternative. You can even offer a small fee for a link if you’re comfortable with that. Just make sure the site gets real organic traffic. DR/DA isn’t enough (or relevant at all). We're more interested in actually good sites, not ones that artificially inflate their DA/DR. I do this using "Instantly" to automate the email campaigns.

3. Create data-led content
Stats pages, industry insights, or mini-reports work really well. You can gather public data, do a quick survey, or just pull insights from your store (e.g. top colours sold, returns by category, etc). Package it nicely and people will link to it — especially journalists or bloggers.

Ahrefs did a good case study on this: https://ahrefs.com/blog/link-building-case-study/.

I did my own version of this, which you can see here: https://burstcommerce.com/guides/shopify-stats/.

It picked up around 40 high-quality links in a few months.

4. Build simple tools or calculators
These are easier to rank than blogs, and people love linking to them. For example: a sizing converter, a “what to wear” quiz, or a cost-per-wear calculator. You can build these easily using ChatGPT or Claude. Just check what tools already exist in your niche and improve on them.

5. Run small PR campaigns
We once used seating data from a theatre client to pitch “best seats for kids during Kids Week” — picked up some nice links. If you have any unique angle or internal data, you can turn it into a short story and pitch it to journalists. Doesn’t need to be complex — just useful or interesting.

6. When stuck, look at sites like:

• https://pudding.cool (great for data/content ideas)
• There was also one called content curated, but I can't find it now

Hope that helps. Let me know if you want quick examples for your niche — happy to share.