I've joined a few programs and have not received any emails from the merchants about their terms of service.
The reason I ask is because one merchant asked about being able to refund an affiliate's earnings because they were a customer, which violated the TOS.
Merchants can do whatever they want to their TOS and will get more or less affiliates accordingly but I see a potential problem. Most merchants don't have a TOS listed in their affiliate signup area, so what if I joined, made a bunch of sales for the merchant, and then the went back in and changed their TOS to say "no paid search" or something else and don't pay me.
I would be saying that it wasn't in the TOS and that there never was one, but unless I took a screenshot of the page with the date, I'd be out of luck.
This could be very, very bad for affiliates and could get ejunkie in a firestorm of negative PR should some affiliates suffer due to unjust non-payment.