How can I restrict gift cards to certain countries and manage refunds?

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment
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Topic summary

Issue: A gift card was purchased from Germany despite shipping being limited to the US, UK, and Canada. After immediately refunding the gift card, the account showed a negative balance. The poster asks how to restrict gift cards by country and why the negative balance occurred, also inquiring about contacting Shopify.

Proposed restriction: Use visitor geolocation to control on-site actions. On the gift card page, hide or disable the Add to Cart button for visitors from disallowed countries (e.g., Germany). A guide is referenced with code to obtain visitor location; adapt it so the action hides the purchase option instead of showing a message.

Refund/negative balance: Credit card transaction fees charged by the payment processor (bank/visa/mastercard) are not refundable. When the gift card was refunded, the processing fee remained, resulting in a negative balance.

Status and outcomes:

  • No native Shopify setting was provided; only a front‑end geolocation workaround.
  • Reason for negative balance explained (non-refundable processing fees).
  • How to contact Shopify was not addressed; discussion appears open with unanswered support-channel details.
Summarized with AI on December 23. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Okay I have a few questions. First of all, how can I restrict my gift cards to only certain countries? I have my shipping set to only US, UK, and Canada, yet I sold a gift card to Germany. I do not know how to fix it.
Secondly, I issued a refund right away for that gift card and now my account is in a negative balance. Why did it do this? Is there a way I can even contact Shopify to sort this out? Please help!

2

You can restrict actions on your site based on the visitor location.

For example, if visitor is browsing from Germany, then hide or disable the add to cart button on the gift page.

This guide shows you how to get visitor location: How to Get Visitor Location on a Shopify Site, use that code but instead of the action being to show a message, have the action be to hide the add to cart button.

About your second question, if you accept a credit card payment, you get charged a transaction fee by the bank handling the transaction. That charge is not refundable (the bank / visa / mastercard, etc still had to make the charge, regardless of what happened after the transaction).

Hope that helps.