A small woodworking project may need three short lengths rather than a full board. A listing can say “oak offcut” without telling the buyer whether the whole cut list fits. OffcutFit connects the project, the physical cut plan and the payment order in one small-workshop checkout.
The customer describes the project in ordinary English. A local MiniLM model ranks three material descriptions, and the customer chooses the material. A direct selector and a TF-IDF alternative remain available. On twelve fixed, authored example queries, both ranking methods matched the intended card eleven times. MiniLM recovered one layered-sheet paraphrase missed by TF-IDF but misranked an explicit softwood query. This is an inspection set, not evidence of superior unseen-query accuracy or faster buying. Dimensions remain explicit: the model cannot substitute a species, enlarge a remnant, or waive the saw kerf.
The prototype models 90×18 mm strips from one workshop, for collection there. The cutting engine searches individually priced remnants for a complete plan within the budget. The demo total includes cutting with no additional demo tax or fees. Buying whole remnants also gives the buyer their remaining tails, which are displayed separately from saw loss rather than returned to the merchant's inventory. In the invented inventory, 500, 500 and 350 mm pine pieces fit a $9.70 plan. This is an engine example, not a commercial price or measured saving. If the bounded search stops early, it distinguishes an unfinished search from a proven lack of a fitting plan.
Checkout uses the server's stored plan. A PayPal sandbox order carries its amount and plan identifier. The server reserves selected inventory entries, blocks a competing quote from buying them and records completion only after the same order has a matching complete capture. Before a capture attempt, local cancellation closes the quote and releases its entries; that quote can no longer be captured through the app. After an uncertain capture, lookup can record a completed payment or an authoritative void, while retries keep the same request key. A timeout alone never releases the inventory. Cancellation here is not a PayPal refund or remote void.
Surplus marketplaces already connect sellers and buyers, and cutting optimizers already calculate layouts. OffcutFit's contribution is the working connection between a buyer's constrained cut list, one merchant's finite remnant stock and that merchant's checkout. It makes no claim to have invented nesting, surplus sales or sentence embeddings. Offcut's published rules leave payment and delivery to users; Tørn already handles surplus transactions and shipping. Those are relevant alternatives, not absent competitors.
The current suite passes 27 tests with explicit payment fixtures and local HTTP checks. Authenticated Sandbox OAuth and order creation ran for USD9.70. After buyer approval, the sandbox capture completed and an official provider lookup confirmed a matching COMPLETED capture for USD9.70. The server marked remnants P1 and P3 sold, and a repeated local capture request returned already-captured. In a separate browser run, the PayPal JavaScript SDK's approval callback completed a matching Sandbox capture. The buyer signed in to a Personal Sandbox account, then used PayPal's returned approval link in the existing checkout popup. The cancellation/reconciliation failure routes have fixture evidence, rather than a real network failure experiment.
