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As for shaving in general, it happens at many points along the process and for different reasons.
"pure" shaving is just not creditting sales to your account. 1 for me, 1 for you... A program paying $30 a sale underreporting by 10% would certain see a big difference in their bottom line for operations.
Some programs also shave certain types of sales (backup processors, check sales, or whatever) as a known part of their program. In reality this is not a shave, just part of the terms and conditions you might not have read.
Some programs "shave" by putting links off their tour pages that don't pay you, or collect email addresses or whatever without paying you for the surfer. This is becoming less of an issue as mail programs have sort of died out due to can-spam rules.
The current shaving I see the most is "hit shaving" and "conversion improvement" shaving. Counting only 2nd page, join page, or similar hits and then reporting your sales ratios based on this. I track every single hit I send to sponsors, and I can tell you some of them don't count for shit, often requiring the surfer to go 2 or more pages into a tour to count as a hit. I think programs do this mostly to make their sales rations look better than they would otherwise. Most major programs these days will display sales based on unique clicks rather than raw clicks.
The other current popular shave is the "foreign traffic skim". Basically, surfers from certain countries never even make it to the tour, and are instead redirected to console hell, dialer downloads, or fluffed off to traffic trades. You get no credit for the hit, no chance to make the sale,and no benefit from the surfer. This is the hardest skim of all to keep track of, because you would have to spoof IP and other variables to see the end results. Programs like SPAcash openly redirect surfers based on IP to different tours, it isn't hard to picture programs using similar technology to other ends (and note, this isn't a comment on SPACash... I don't like their geo stuff, but I don't even suggest that they skim or do anything of the like... they are an honest program based on what I know!).
Good luck....
Alex
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