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Affiliate programs by and large have an incentive to not track all sales; broken / flawed tracking leaves more for the "house".
Programs using NATS and other 3rd party tracking tend to be more reliable, but even with that, tracking relies a lot on the affiliate operator who can use various underhanded tactics to cause tracking to be dropped / altered, along with using the old tried and true method of traffic leaks.
Rambling on, but the above relates to your comment ... many old time programs relied on embedded tracking codes that didn't depend on cookies at all, and supplemented that with IP tracking and other heuristics.
Just relying on a cookie alone is bad form, but somehow became the standard, because it was easy and works good enough, but often not well - the perfect out for shaving ...
Affiliate programs who solely rely on cookies can say with a straight face they don't shave, which is technically true ... and yet the reality is they are in effect shaving by their use of a known very flawed tracking method.
With all that said, what's an affiliate to do other than being more selective in who they promote / pushing for better tracking...
Well, some things to try are...
Checking for cookies and encouraging their use (show more content to those who offer to turn cookies on) ... and/or checking for 3rd party cookie acceptance (method often requires having multiple domains) along with checking cookie data persistence and dynamically generating pages based on the cookie / browser privacy level one appears to be running ...
For those users running default privacy, generate pages with links to programs that utilize traditional cookie tracking methods ... while for those users who appear to be rejecting / refreshing cookie data and/or running adblock, etc generate pages to programs that may not be as profitable, but have better tracking and/or to programs that may be not as targeted, but more likely to convert on the spot.
Ron
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Domagon - Website Management and Domain Name Sales
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