Why doesn't refunding to a gift card always work?

[Awwink]

I’ve noticed that sometimes when I issue a refund it doesn’t give me the option to refund to a gift card (which is our policy) and it automatically goes back to the persons credit card. 

What is the reason for this?

[Oldfire]

Hi there, as the other commenter said, this is unfortunately not possible with Shopify out of the box. 

In order to solve this problem via an even better way than gift cards, there's also an app I created: https://apps.shopify.com/neat-credit

You can use it straight off the Order page and the discount codes make more sense to customers than gift cards.