There are a number of reasons why a refund processed in your database would fail to refund to Credit Card. When there is a refund failure, we return an error message that includes the gateway response. The first sentence of the error message is always "Could not process a refund." Everything after this sentence is the error message returned by your gateway.

One of the most common error messages is: "Could not process a refund. The referenced transaction does not meet the criteria for issuing a credit". It can be caused by a number of circumstances.
First, the payment being refunded may not have been settled yet, and is not a full refund. Most gateways require that the transaction settle before a partial refund can be processed.
Second, the payment being refunded may be too old to refund. Most gateways only allow transactions to be refunded 90-120 days after initial payment.
Third, your gateway may have flagged the refund as a possible fraudulent transaction; commonly caused by a series of refunds in the same amount, to the same credit card.


Beyond these common causes, a number of other gateway failures could cause a refund to post to Unapplied Funds rather than back to the customer's credit card. Whenever you encounter an error message on an attempted refund, your first action should be to login to your gateway and view the details there.