Amazon maintains a dominant position in both online retail and cloud computing, opposite ends of the e-commerce spectrum that have very little in common besides the delicate balance between buyers and sellers. Terry Hanold, the vice president of cloud commerce for AWS, dropped by theCUBE at re:Invent 2013 to walk us through the ins and outs of public cloud trading.

The AWS Marketplace, one of Hanold’s main areas of responsibility, enables technologists to address the IT needs of their users while helping partners boost the bottom line, he says. By making software more accessible and affordable to customers, he explains, the Marketplace empowers vendors to reach new clients, avoid months-long software license negotiations and accelerate time-to-value.

Despite these benefits, some traditional ISVs remain skeptical about offering their solutions on a pay-as-a-you-go basis. Amazon is not looking to impose its business model on partners, Hanold stresses, but it is working on new pricing options that will hopefully make the transition smoother for those clinging to the old way of doing things.

“We firmly believe at AWS that if you lower costs and make things easier, in the long run, you will have more customers, have a better business, and have customers doing more than if you put friction in it and try to scrape every last penny off the table,” Hanold tells theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante.

Cloud services free up resources for innovation, driving increased business value that trickles down to providers. Hanold has witnessed this affect firsthand: “We screw up at Amazon with surprising regularity,” he details, explaining that the low cost of failure enables his firm to learn from its mistakes and “innovate faster than any company I’ve ever been with.”

Watch the interview below for more exclusive insight into the inner workings of the AWS Marketplace and the important differences between selling material goods and providing software in the cloud.