From an affiliates point of view...lost sales.
A few years ago a group of us on Netpond said we were all gonna randomly signup through a referring tag to various paysites and see which affiliate program actually counted the most joins.
Affiliate program owners went insane immediately.Lining excuses up prior to us even doing the test.
Most scored around 12-14/20 of them.Some 6/20 LOL, the best one was 15/20 if I remember correctly.
This in the future led me on one of our affiliate programs to try and score every single join and attribute it to the right refferer.No matter how we tried at least 10-15% were untracked , and we were trying hard.
You are all losing sales.Either through honest inability to track , or outright shaving.
So...
Never worry about the ratios.Send traffic to whoever sends the biggest wire /cheque