In this paper we obtain improved dimensional thresholds for dot product sets corresponding to compact subsets of a paraboloid. As a direct application of these estimates, we obtain significant improvements to the best known dimensional thresholds that guarantee that a given compact subset of Euclidean space determines a positive proportion of all possible congruence classes of simplexes. In many regimes this improves the results previously obtained by Erdogan-Hart-Iosevich (\cite{EHI}), Greenleaf-Iosevich-Liu-Palsson (\cite{GILP}) and others.