A refund is the merchant giving your money back; a chargeback is your bank or card issuer forcibly reversing the charge. Both return funds, but they are different processes with different rules. The chargeback guide covers the mechanics, but the short version is: try the store's refund first, and treat a chargeback as the backstop.
Why not just charge back immediately? Issuers expect you to attempt a refund through the merchant first, and filing a chargeback without doing so can be rejected or flagged. Worse, some platforms react to chargebacks by restricting the account. So the order matters: request the refund, escalate through the dispute path, and only then involve your issuer if you're truly stuck.
Chargebacks do have real strengths. They sit outside the store's policy, so they can work when a "final sale" or "non-refundable" clause is being misapplied, and in some regions a credit-card Section 75 or debit-card chargeback right backs you on faulty goods. The regional pages (UK, EU, AU, Canada) explain the statutory rights that chargebacks often enforce.
Timing is tight: issuers impose dispute windows (commonly 120 days from the transaction or the expected delivery date), so don't sit on a denied refund for months. Gather your evidence file first — order IDs, the refund denial, crash logs — because the issuer will ask for it. Use the chargeback guide to file correctly the first time.