I’ve been looking into DS Domination for awhile now and wanted to give you my personal opinion on it.
While the idea itself does have potential, I really feel that most of the results you’ll get from this program is by promoting it to others, MLM style, which for those of you who don’t already know, I am NOT a big fan of. But more on that later…
DS Domination in a nutshell:
You basically utilize the system given to you by DS Domination, find products on places like Amazon, then sell them for a higher price on places like E-bay, keep the difference, repeat the same formula for multiple products and that is basically how the system works.
There is also an MLM type affiliate program which pays you for referring people into the DS Domination program, but only after they buy one of the program’s memberships or products which is basically training to help promote the program to others.
Getting into specific details…
Firstly, DS stands for drop shipping. Drop shipping is a form of selling via the internet where you sell products you don’t actually own at a higher price to people. Once people buy the product, you order it from a retailer and they ship it to them.
Here’s how this works in layman’s terms:
- You find a product you wish to sell. This could be from popular online retail stores. Let’s say it’s a smartphone for $300.
- Once you find it, you don’t buy it, but instead put up the product up on places like E-bay and charge more for it. Say $350.
- If someone buys the product through E-bay, they’ll pay you the $350.
- Then you go back to the original retail store where the product is sold for $300, order it and ship it to the buyer.
- You keep $50 (minus E-bay fees + taxes).
- Rinse and repeat this formula.
While there are a lot of people successfully doing this and there is massive potential behind the drop shipping, there is difficulty in multi-tasking especially when it comes to selling many items and using this formula. This is supposedly where the DS Domination system comes into play and helps automate everything for you.
Why I’m not going to be using it.
While it does sound good, I honestly believe you can do without it because in my personal opinion, it is not cost effective in the long run.
1. Firstly, there are membership fees you have to pay within the DS Domination program which range from the Pro level which is about $20 a month to an Elite level which is close to $100 a month. These will give you training on how to better succeed with DS Domination and help teach you to refer others into the program.
There are also additional offers such as the Unleashed course for nearly $250 and a course called Monopoly for nearly $500. If you wish to promote the company as an affiliate, there is a $9.95 a month fee that you’ll have to pay.
2. While the bigger priced training is optional to buy, DS Domination does say they give you 100% commissions if you get people to buy these products, but one thing that I am almost certain you’ll have to do is actually buy those products first in order to be eligible. In other words, if I wanted to sell the $500 training course, I’d have to buy it first (correct me if I am wrong on this).
This is very characteristic of an MLM company and on a personal note, I do not like it. I’m also NOT a fan of the affiliate fee even though it’s not much, but either way, I do affiliate marketing and things I promote do NOT require you to buy them first. I just find it a shady way to make an extra buck and am personally against it.
3. How much can you really make using the DS Domination system? Obviously people will want to try and sell high priced items in order to make higher commissions of them. That’s understandable.
However, I’m sure a lot of people will also be selling this stuff and competing with you in terms of pricing meaning you’ll potentially make less per sale. Let’s not even get into the lower priced items as the profit margin there will likely be pennies if nothing at all.
4. As far as I know, places like Amazon (Prime) do NOT allow this sort of stuff.
5. Lots of people utilizing this approach to selling meaning there’s going to be a lot of competition. Take into account that you also have your monthly fees with this program and I strongly believe your profit margin will be even lower.
Pros:
- There is profit potential behind this program & drop shipping, but in my opinion not much.
- The system is comfortable to use.
Cons:
- I don’t believe there is massive profit potential behind this system is you subtract the cost of the program, fees, taxes and other expenses.
- I believe the DS Domination system may violate some TOS major retail places have.
- I think doing drop shipping on your own is more profitable in the short/long run than using a system like this.
- The referral program in my opinion is questionable on many fronts and I will personally not be promoting this place.
- There is a lot of hype and not much transparency on their sales page.
- Drop shipping is a very competitive industry. Affiliate marketing is better, see what it is and why.
Final Rating: DS Domination
Red Flag
2 out of 10 stars. I don’t think it’s a scam, but I also believe it’s obsolete. Aside from the referral program, I doubt there’s much money to be made here. I prefer more sustainable and better alternatives like this.
My Final Thoughts:
As someone whose been doing online marketing for years (not drop shipping), I question anything and everything when I see a program which says they’ll help you make money offline/online with easy, automated, ect… To me that’s hyped and I do tons of research before making a decision.
With DS Domination there are a lot of questions and I honestly couldn’t get most of them answered through the program itself. I had to browse reviews, forums and basically connect the dots. While everything I say in this post is based on my personal opinion, there are a lot of questions with this program that make me VERY skeptical about trying it.
My biggest issue with this program
In my opinion, the only profitable way to utilize DS Domination is to refer people into the program, but this is where I am at a cross roads and that’s because if the system itself in my personal view isn’t that profitable to begin with, why would I want to promote it to others? So that they can then try to get others into it as well? Well then we have a recipe for a pyramid scheme which I’m totally against.
I believe in having an honest long term online business and I just don’t think that can happen through this program and as I said before there are much better ways to succeed online. Drop shipping on it’s own is certainly one of those options. So is this.
Do you have a personal opinion/review of DS Domination you’d like to share? If so, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it!
I wanted to leave my own comment here. I’ve been in DS Domination for just 2 months and actually none of what you all are skeptical about is true. Actually many of the suppliers that are talked about in the DS Domination training encouraged dropshipping as I have talked with them on the phone myself. I even have a free business account with one supplier and I get discounted prices because of it. They are selling on eBay themselves and I’m selling their same products there. You should do a review once you’ve joined a program, not just using here say. Also if there were any issues with selling in this manner, then most gas stations would close down because they buy most of their merchandise from big chain stores and sell in their gas stations. Also, any business is competitive, but staying competitive and working hard is the key. Money doesn’t happen over night, but the people who are putting real effort into DS Domination, are seeing real results. I put in about 15 hours a week and am profiting $50-$85 a day (not an income disclosure statement). I would be making more but just don’t have time to list more on eBay. I’m outselling people who have lower prices that me because of the training I’m implementing from DS Domination.
I hear your arguments Adam, I really do and I always welcome a friendly debate, but I still feel like DS domination, among being irreverent since you can do DS on your own, plus them having a number of other practice (no refund I saw) and charging so much for unnecessary things makes me side with my point of view.
It’s great to see you’re doing well with it and I wish you the best moving forward and I totally agree, hard work is what counts, but I also believe you are limiting your potential by working through them. Just my 2 cents.
Glad to read this. I’m not a part of DS domination, but I have utilized the same method for the past weeks. Turns out I lost alot of profit, and the only real profit I made are from those international buyers (They pay big money for shipping). Reason I said I lost profit is because the item that I was originally going to make 10 dollar profit ended up losing instead and more. Amazon charges sales tax for 20 different states, and they are only going to add more!!! These sales tax can eat up a huge some of your profits. And ebay/paypal fees. All I seem to picture is FEES, FEES, FEES. I have to admit, it really does work but since amazon charges tax it has defeat it’s purpose. Anybody have any say on this?
Hey David, I have read about this before. Apparently it’s not really Amazon, but the particular state which is causing these fees & taxes to be implemented. This has actually caused a lot of potential affiliates to leave because they are also experiencing a small profit margin in their sales.
Even though I don’t do drop shipping and you probably already know this, I would imagine that the best way to get around this is to sell the higher priced items and hopefully in larger quantities. Obviously this is easier said than done so perhaps one option is to promote items which are very hot on the market. One of the best ways to do this is:
Utilize Amazon’s best seller list.
Find products in different categories on the site, see the top 100 being sold, pick the one which provides the most in profit potential and sell that.
Just my 2 cents (literally lol).
You beat me by about 6 days on this one! I did a review of it as well and was shocked at how much they charge for information that can get you banned from Amazon. I didn’t know it was against their TOS until I read around a bit while researching.
This product is heavily promoted because they push their affiliate program. When people don’t make money with ebay/amazon, they naturally move to the aff program and then promote it on FB and Twitter.
I’m glad we’re in agreement on this Nat. I saw your review of this program and you were much more critical of it than I.